I sat there mouth open in surprise as Brian Williams reported last evening on NBC Nightly News. It seems that back during the Cold War there was a crazy scheme to use nuclear weapons to blow up the moon.
Ka-Boom, Batman, Right out of the sky.
To impress (or scare the living
daylights nightlights out of) the Soviets.
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.Of course the whole moon wouldn't have been blown out of the sky. I don't think. But it might have sure put a big dent in that old man;s face.
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.
Not to mention scaring the rest of us into a heart attack or two.
Fortunately "saner" minds prevailed thanks, we are told to Carl Sagan.
As always, it proves the obvious that whether a war is "hot" or "cold" we humans tend to get caught up in craziness.