ABikerSailor
Diamond Member
Seems that there was a top secret project going on during the Cold War that the U.S. wanted to use to intimidate Russia.
They wanted to blow up the moon............................
US planned to blow up Moon with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might - Sci/Tech - DNA
Good thing they didn't, or Neil Armstrong might never have become famous.
They wanted to blow up the moon............................
The US had planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb in the 1950s.
At the height of the space race, the US considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of Americas Cold War muscle.
The secret project, named A Study of Lunar Research Flights and nicknamed Project A119, however was never carried out.
Americas planning included calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, then a young graduate student, of the behavior of dust and gas generated by the blast, the Daily Mail reports.
According to the report, 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 said.
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.
The planners decided it would have to be an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy for the missile, the report said.
Military officials apparently abandoned the idea because of the danger to people on Earth in case the mission failed, the report added.
The scientists also registered concerns about contaminating the moon with radioactive material, Reiffel said.
US planned to blow up Moon with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might - Sci/Tech - DNA
Good thing they didn't, or Neil Armstrong might never have become famous.