U.S. 'planned to blow up Moon' with nuke during Cold War

ANI ^ | 27th November 2012 | ANI

[the scotsman]

'The U.S. had planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb in the 1950s.

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.

The secret project, named 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' and nicknamed 'Project A119,' however was never carried out.

America's 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.'

[moovova]

Blow up the moon?

Think of all the surfboard shops/manufacturers that would be out of business. Not to mention how many ticked off surfers there’d be.

“Dude! Where’s the moon?”
“I don’t know bro, but where are the curls, man?”

[Stosh]

” “blow up the moon” and “explode a nuclear bomb on the moon” are two different things.”

As per usual, the commentary on FR is more perceptive than the third-rate crap dished out by the MSM.

To put things in perspective, a scientific assessment of the likely consequences of a collision between the asteroid YU55 and the earth, as reported by the “Telegraph” of London:

“If it were to hit the earth, the asteroid, named YU55, would have an impact equivalent to 65,000 atom bombs and would leave a crater more than six miles wide and 2,000ft deep.”

So in other words if we were able to deliver 65,000 atom bombs to a specific location on the moon simultaneously, we might have been able to do some significant damage to it (but we still wouldn’t have “blown it up”). Indeed, the crater in the scenario above would be small potatoes compared to those which are visible (essentially to the naked eye) from earth.

[Conserev1]

Bogus!!!!

[DesertRhino]

It’s so obvious that one atomic bomb would do nothing, and probably not even be visible with the naked eye.
This is obvious withing 5 minutes on FR. This is one of two things, playing the “Look how stupid America is game”.
Or, it was some obscure academic lab exercise that Carl Sagan was involved in as a student and it makes a cool story to pretend it was real.
I can see having a grad student in some lab calculate what the effect of a nuke on the moon would be for pure academic reasons. We were right in the middle of aggressive testing then to learn everything we could about them.

But it’s a near certainty that there was never a plan to do this. Someone else pointed out that we couldnt do low earth orbit yet, and we were going to send a rocket, ANY ROCKET, to the moon? Please.

[TiaS]

In his later years, Sagan had an office in the Space Science Building at Cornell. I never got to see him on campus but I enjoyed the cartoons he used to leave on his office door when he was away. He also became a controversial anti-nuclear activist. I recall him protesting with a group at the Nevada test site.

[TiaS]

It is true that Edward Teller, at the time the first A-Bomb was to be tested in southern New Mexico, believed the explosion might ignite the entire earth’s atmosphere — he went forward with the test anyway. It seems they don’t ask our consent in such matters. National Security, you know?

[Ole Okie]

Remember all those launch pad explosions ?

Those explosions were primarily Viking rockets, I seem to remember, developed for the Navy by a civilian contractor.

Huntsville, home of military rocket development, was supposed to keep hands off the space program, so the available V-2 and Redstone rockets were off limits for the space program.

After Sputnik, the complexion of the space race changed radically. The United States panicked. Ultimately we did what should have been done initially, namely use Redstone rockets to put a satellite in orbit.

All this is from memory, so if I'm wrong on details, c'est la vie.

[Overtaxed]

Bright kid. He ought to get ahead in the moon.

[jaz.357]

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I was 11 years old in ‘59 but recall the Navy vs. Army rocket rivalry. I can recall seeing those slender rockets rising a few feet off the pad, then falling straight down into a fiery inferno (over and over.)
My folks were stationed on an Army base in Japan at the time. Most anything like this was in news magazines, Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Radio and reported without an agenda back then..

[Covenantor]

That would be the Navy Vanguard rocket. The four successive failures made it the butt of jokes

Among my elementary school cohort the Vanguard rocket model kit was the least desired. Well, except for re-enactment of the fiery crashes simulated by packing it with strike anywhere match heads and set off with gasoline soaked string. Ah, the days before the nannies fell upon the youth of America.