When the USA thought about nuclearizing the Moon
The USA had thought of something that would seem to have come out of a 007 film, only implemented by the villain of the moment: launching a missile with a nuclear warhead against the Moon and causing it to explode on the surface in a crater, with such a size as to make it clearly visible from the Earth. The purposes were scientific, but also terror and propaganda.
In 1958, the United States realized that it was losing the space race, a key part of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Just a year earlier, the Soviets had launched Sputnik 1, humanity's first satellite, and although the United States launched a satellite of its own a few months later, we had nothing else to respond with.
Our technology was not at all ready to send people to the Moon, in fact it would still take more than 10 years, but it was ready enough to send something else, for example a nuclear bomb.
That's when someone thought of Project A119. The plan was to detonate a medium-yield nuclear bomb in a crater on the Moon. The effect would have been twofold: allowing scientists to study the effects of the explosion on the lunar surface and demonstrating to the world the power of US nuclear weapons.
Nuclear explosion
Scientists at the time thought it would be possible to see the explosion from Earth with the naked eye, which would be a propaganda boost for the Government and would strike terror into America's enemies. As for radiation damage on the Moon, they estimated that any potential negative impact would be minimal.
“The amount of radiation that will be created – or more precisely, the amount of contamination – would be relatively low. We are talking about relatively low-yield nuclear weapons. There would be some contamination,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, told Digital Trends. “My recollection from the report is that they calculated that a fair amount of radioactive byproducts would basically not end up staying on the Moon. They would get kicked out because of the lack of atmosphere and things like that. It is true? We do not know".
Obviously such an exploit would have led to a rush to bomb the Moon. So if the single bomb would have been relatively harmless, there was the danger, in the medium term, of finding a radioactive satellite. A situation that would certainly have complicated lunar exploration.
Luckily the project never got off the ground and remained top secret until 2000, when a former NASA executive revealed it.
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The article When the USA thought about nuclearizing the Moon comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/quando-gli-usa-pensarono-di-nuclearizzare-la-luna/ on Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:00:11 +0000.