Posted on 06/02/2023 3:09:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
At the end of the 1950s — a decade shy of Apollo 11’s successful lunar landing — the US military had the radical idea of detonating a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon, Air Force documents from 1959 show.
“Nuclear detonations in the vicinity of the moon are considered in this report with scientific information which might be obtained from such explosions … The detonation of a nuclear weapon on or near the moon’s surface has often been suggested,” according to the now unclassified report.
“The military aspect is aided by investigation of space environment, detection of nuclear device testing, and capability of weapons in space.” The proposal was only initially made public after famed physicist Carl Sagan — who had worked on the project and came up with the nuclear concept — revealed details of its existence when applying for a fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Miller Institute in 1959.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
It may have revealed the metal spaceship underneath the fake outer shell.
I cannot recall ever having read or heard Sagan described as a physicist.
Yep. Dahak would be pissed.
The military is like someone with a hammer seeing everything as a nail.
Hey there’s the moon! Why not use one of these 9000 nuclear bombs we have?
“Almost blew up the Moon” with nukes.
BS clickbait headline. The Moon has a surface area roughly the size of Africa. All the nukes ever made, used simultaneously, would only slightly scar a small portion of the surface.
Astrophysicist
The destructive power of nukes comes from the blast shockwave and thermal radiation. This requires something dense, like an atmosphere. Absent an atmosphere (such as on the moon) there'd be no destructive shockwave and the thermal radiation would quickly dissipate.
Where’s the Kaboom?
Didn’t Marvin the Martian already do that? I seem to remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid.
Oh for the love of algore.
They did no such thing.
A nuclear blast on earth, is contained by gravity.
A nuclear blast in space, packs a wallop for every bit of mass that is “nearby” (relative).
In addition, the heat from a nuclear blast on the moon, will be very much noticed . . . by the moon.
I say good riddance to it, keeps me up at night when I forget to close the blinds.
I agree it’s a clickbait headline, but not for the reason you state. They has no way to get nuclear weapons to the moon.
Hundreds of millions of years of near zero atmosphere and the Sun bombarding particles has resulted in inches deep Tritium on most of the surface of the Moon. Tritium is a very rare heavy hydrogen isotope used for thermonuclear fusion.
So yes, blowing a fission bomb on the surface of the Moon might “ignite” the entire Moon into fusion reaction killing us all.
The moon aliens might have retaliated against us.
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