The moon nearly had a man-made crater on it.
Over the past 70 years, scientists have created detailed maps of the entire surface of the moon in minute detail, right down to every crater and rock formation. But those maps almost looked a lot different, considering the fact that the United States wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon a decade before we sent the first humans there.
That's right, Project A119 (which might as well have been called Project Nuke the Moon) was a real U.S. Air Force project to send an atomic bomb to the moon and detonate it in a spot where the explosion would be seen from Earth. Why? Because we could, and because we wanted the Kremlin to see that we could, in a nutshell.
That team of scientists working on the project included a young graduate student named Carl Sagan. Yes, that Carl Sagan, who became one of the most famous and beloved cosmologists and science communicators of all time. If you're wondering whether he thought nuking the moon was a whackadoodle idea or not, apparently he was at least somewhat on board with it. He thought it might reveal information about possible microbes or organic compounds on the moon.
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Let's step back for a minute here. This was the 1950s, a time when much of our scientific advancements and nearly all of our space research was inextricably linked to the Cold War. Support for science was largely dictated by political and military aims, which left scientists to mold their own goals and aims around the projects the government wanted to explore.
If the military wanted to create an explosion on the moon big enough for the Kremlin to see it and feel intimidated, scientists would make the most of the opportunity to learn what they could from it. Some of the team were interested in what the detonation would reveal about the chemical makeup of the moon. Others were interested in studying the seismic effect of the blast on the moon's subsurface structure.
The top-secret project, known by the benign title "A Study of Lunar Research Flights," was launched in 1958 and led by physicist Leonard Reiffel, who would eventually become deputy director of NASA's Apollo Program. To his credit, he did try to explain to the government why nuking the moon might not be such a great idea, scientifically speaking.
"I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment," Reiffel told The Observer. "But the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on Earth."
The plan was to detonate a bomb on the Terminator Line, the border between the light and dark side of the moon, which would be the location most visible from Earth. And as asinine as it might sound to us now, the goal of this enormous undertaking really was just to flex our muscles—to show Russia that we could best them in both the space and the arms race.
"It is a pretty interesting window into the sort of American mindset at that time," Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology, told the BBC. "This push to compete in a way that creates something very impressive. I think, in this case, impressive and horrifying are a bit too close to each other."
Reiffel himself told The Observer in 2000, ‘It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth."
Would it have even worked, though? According to Reiffel, they could have gotten the bomb within two miles of where they wanted it and could have detonated it, creating a big enough flash bang to see from here. However, there wouldn't have been a mushroom cloud, since there's very little atmosphere on the moon. Without the resistance of a dense atmosphere, the dust and debris from the explosion would just keep expanding outward; it wouldn't curl back inward into any kind of formation like it would on Earth.
Ultimately, nuking the moon didn't happen, though the reasons the project was scrapped are classified and have never been revealed. Thankfully, we went ahead with sending humans to the moon instead of our most notorious weaponry. Can you imagine how much bombing the moon would have changed our approach to space exploration?
As British nuclear historian David Lowry said according to The Guardian, "It is obscene. To think that the first contact human beings would have had with another world would have been to explode a nuclear bomb. Had they gone ahead, we would never have had the romantic image of Neil Armstrong taking 'one giant step for mankind.'"
It was "one giant leap for mankind," actually, but who's counting? Let's all just be grateful we got that giant leap instead of a big ol' nuclear crater that would forever change the way we see the moon, literally and figuratively.
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