The United States planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb during the cold war, according to reports.

The secret project, dubbed 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' or 'Project A119', was allegedly devised by US military chiefs at the height of the space race in the late 1950s as a show of strength over the Soviet Union, scientists claim.

According to reports, the US would have used an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy.

A missile carrying the bomb would have been launched from an undisclosed location on Earth and travel to the moon, where it would detonate on impact.
The project would have been carried out in 1959, but was reportedly abandoned by military officials due to fears that it would endanger people on Earth should the mission fail.
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Physicist Leonard Reiffel, who was involved with the project, said it would have intimidated the Soviet Union and given the US a morale boost after the Russians successfully launched Sputnik in 1957. Reiffel went on to serve as deputy director at NASA.
Scientists involved raised concerns about contaminating the moon with radioactive material, Reiffel said.

Also involved in the project was astronomer Carl Sagan, at the time a young graduate, who carried out calculations about the behaviour of dust and gas generated by the blast.

According to the author of a Sagan biography, he may have committed a security breach in 1959 by disclosing the secret project in an academic fellowship application.

The US government has never formally confirmed its involvement in the project.
The US Air Force declined to comment on the claims.

According to reports, the US would have used an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy.

Before dismissing this completely you have to remember the era we're talking about here... sputnik had just been launched, the first manmade object in orbit. They hadn't even started sending dogs and monkeys up there yet. Space was still pretty much a mystery. They probably had little to no idea of things like the amount of radiation outside our atmosphere, or how important the moon is to life on earth... Almost nobody would have had a clue about things like that in the 50's, especially a bunch of military brass looking for a way to retaliate against the implied threat that sputnik (an emptied out warhead) posed. Hydrogen and atom bombs were so new and they were so impressed with them, I could easily see them coming up with something like this as a show of force.

Just some nice figures:

* A big superstorm like Sandy can easily produce the energy equivalent of 8000 megaton, a day;
* Currently the biggest nuclear arsenal is only 7000 megaton total;
* The biggest nuclear bomb to ever be detonated on earth was 50 megaton;
* The total mass of the moon is 7.34767309 × 10^22 kilograms.

So no, this story is fiction.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Sorry if this is a bit of a derail on the original thread, which in my opinion is absolutely fiction and silly, but Traveler where did you get these figures?

Surely the biggest nuclear arsenal in terms of gigatons is still in the hands of Russia and surely it is over 7 gigatons.

Didn't Russia explode one that was a lot closer to 100 megatons in the early days by taking a super powerful H Bomb configuration and wrapping it in a U-235 "jacket" then exploding it above ground and scaring the crap out of everyone, basically making Soviet and other scientists say "never again" for that particular design?

The biggest nuclear test on earth ever was with the Tsar Bobma