Blow up the moon. It sounds like the grandiose plan of a James Bond villain. Only the idea came, not from a fictional villain, but the government of the United States of America. The secret mission, code-named “Project A119,” was conceived at the dawn of the space race by an Air Force division located at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base. A June 1959 report entitled “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” outlined plans to explode the bomb on the moon’s “terminator” — the area between the part of the surface that’s illuminated by the sun and the part that’s...