Posted on 11/25/2012 4:28:28 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Revealed: How the U.S. planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union
- Scientists were hoping for giant flash on the moon that would intimidate the Soviet Union
- Aim of mission was to launch the nuke by 1959
- Plan was later scrapped due to possible danger to people on Earth
It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s.
At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America's Cold War muscle.
The secret project, innocuously titled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' and nicknamed 'Project A119,' was never carried out
However, its planning included calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, then a young graduate student, of the behavior of dust and gas generated by the blast.
Viewing the nuclear flash from Earth might have intimidated the Soviet Union and boosted U.S. confidence after the launch of Sputnik, physicist Leonard Reiffel told the AP in a 2000 interview.
Reiffel, now 85, directed the inquiry at the former Armour Research Foundation, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He later served as a deputy director at NASA.
Sagan, who later became renowned for popularizing science on television, died in 1996.
The author of one of Sagan's biographies suggested that he may have committed a security breach in 1959 after revealing the classified project in an academic fellowship application. Reiffel concurred.
Under the scenario, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Weren’t they going to try launching from the surface?
The moon has 1.2% the mass of the earth, per Google calculator. That would be like talking of a bomb that could disintegrate a conical wedge of the earth that encompassed the continental USA... I don’t think so, not the biggest thermonuclear device ever constructed on earth.
ping
LOL yeah surface launches was the original plan and fortunately cooler heads prevailed before anybody tried.
Aside from the surface launch, the idea has merit. Some petty serious guys like Freeman Dyson worked on the idea.
A ray of sense on this silly thread.
Well, by the looks of it, it seems like a good idea to me!
Destroy it! Blow it up!
Yer Damn Skippy !
On the other hand, the British had nukes that they stuffed with live chickens to keep the works from getting too cold to function.
Radioactive Chickensh*t Rain would be the forerunner of Nuclear Winter.
I suppose just as long as your gyroscope is big enough to handle that much instantaneous energy release. “Where are we headed?” “How the F*** would I know?”
We wouldn’t do much more than leave a shallow scorched crater on the moon that probably wouldn’t be visible with the naked eye.
what if the big day arrives and its cloudy over the soviet union and no one can see? ever think of that?
I am guessing that thousands of tons of fine ejecta would circulate around the Earth and Moon for many years, with a small percentage getting captured by Earth and its atmosphere every year, day, week, hour, or what have you. It is not clear to me if this would be a significant loading of our exoatmosphere with radionuclides. It would lose its radioactivity at about the speed of any Earthbound nuke site.
Heh-heh-heh, you sly dog. That was on Mars, silly!
Thanks DogByte6RER. This story is bullsh!t. There was never a “plan” to do this, but some jackass or small number of jackasses in the Pentagon suggested this as a really good idea. It was roundly rejected at the time because it was both stupid and counterproductive. And in 1959, Eisenhower was still in his “everything is provocative” mode; in 1960 he kiboshed the US’ orbiting a probe, requiring that the top stage was non-functional. As if a suborbital rocket was less provocative. What a Peter Principle Success Story that guy was.
Sidebar — Von Braun’s F1 engine was developed for the DoD, as a delivery system for the Teller H-Bomb, which was a huge-assed design. The B-52 was also conceived as a delivery system for the Teller bomb. Turned out that a smaller H-bomb design was successfully tested and developed instead, but the B-52 went into production. The successfully engineered F1 was cancelled, but Von Braun managed to take it along with him as he sought support for a Moon program. He didn’t get it until JFK got tired of being shown up by the “(blankity-blank) Russians”. Not long after, Von Braun said in an article or interview that the upper stages of the Apollo would be 100% cryo, and the Soviet rocketmaster Sergei Korolev scorned the idea, claiming that the problems would be too much for Von Braun to solve.
The next time Korolev read about Von Braun’s 100% cryo engines, they were being successfully tested on the test stand. The USSR had lost the Moon race, just like that, even assuming that their approach would have worked. Korolev died in 1966; his N-1 booster with its dozens of engines never had a successful flight test, and according to one guy involved in the project, never even made it to the test stand most of the time.
The public should laugh the author of the article and the tabloid right off of the Internet for their sheer mendacious stupidity and scaremongering tactics.
As the article noted, the proposal is supposedd to have been a fission atomic bomb and not a fusion hydrogen bomb, because the missiles of the time were incapable of launching the extremely heavy hydrogen bombs of the day. This means the explosion would have been a sub-megaton yield similar to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations. Such explosions would have been detectable on the Earth, but only by observers ready and waiting to observe a flash nearly too small to see and lasting for little more than a second in time. Since the Moon has practically no atmosphere, the blast effects would have been far less than those which occurred on the Earth. There would have resulted a very small crater, barely detectable with telescopes from the Earth.
The headline’s scaremongering about “blowing up the Moon” is as outrageous as it is utterly ridiculous. The Moon is routinely punished with impacts releasing far more explosive energy than such a small atomic bomb, and no one ever notices those explosions. The Moon far from being blown up or destroyed would hardly notice such an insignicantly tiny event in comparison to its history of impacts.
Everyone needs to laugh the author out of the business.
Of course poets would have been upset, along with other earthlings, if the moon had disappeared from the sky.
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