US had a secret plan to nuke the Moon during the Cold War
In 1958, the US Air Force secretly studied detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon to show up the Soviet Union, before scrapping the idea
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were not only racing to build weapons but also competing to show their strength in space. As part of this rivalry, the United States in 1958 conceived a plan that would be unimaginable today. The US Air Force drew up a highly secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb directly on the surface of the Moon. The mission was codenamed "Project A119," while official documents referred to it as "A Study of Lunar Research Flights."
Behind this event, unprecedented in human history, lay not just scientific research but a major race to display political and military power. The aim was to show the world that the United States was in no way behind the Soviet Union in space technology.
This extreme planning followed a major event in 1957. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully sent the world's first man-made satellite, Sputnik-1, into space. This caused a sensation around the world over Russia's technical progress and dealt a major blow to American military and scientific confidence. A sense of fear and embarrassment spread among the American public and government over this setback. To avenge this embarrassment and win back the American public's trust, the Air Force decided to do something big and unusual. Against this backdrop, a team of researchers was formed under the leadership of the "Armour Research Foundation" (now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology), and a study began into the possibility of detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon.
A team led by physicist Leonard Reiffel, the head of the project, examined various aspects of the plan. The team also included the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, who was given responsibility for building a mathematical model of the dust and light spread that would result from the blast.
According to the plan, the idea was to drop a small atomic bomb on the "terminator" line on the edge of the Moon, where light and darkness meet, or on its dark side. When the blast occurred, the plan was that the resulting bright flash and expanding cloud of debris would be clearly visible from Earth with the naked eye or a telescope. The main purpose behind this was public relations -- to give the world a sense of America's power.
On Earth, when a nuclear bomb explodes, air pressure and the atmosphere cause an umbrella-shaped smoke cloud, or "mushroom cloud," to form. But on the Moon, such a cloud could not form at all, since the Moon does not have an atmosphere like Earth's. According to the scientific study, if a blast occurred on the Moon, no shockwave or mushroom cloud would form there. Instead, the energy of the blast would send lunar soil and rock flying rapidly into space, and with sunlight falling on it, this would appear from Earth as a large, glowing cloud.
Considerable research and mathematical calculation went into Project A119, but the plan was never actually carried out. There were several major scientific and ethical reasons behind this. Scientists feared that radiation from the blast could spread into space and interfere with Earth's atmosphere or future human space missions. Besides this, a nuclear bomb would have made the Moon's actual surface radioactive, making it difficult to carry out scientific research there in future or to search for signs of life. Another fear was that if the rocket carrying the atomic bomb exploded in Earth's atmosphere during launch itself, it could cause major devastation within the United States itself.
Given all these risks, the US Air Force quietly shut down the project in 1959. Later, in 1967, the United States, Russia and several other countries signed the "Outer Space Treaty," under which the testing of nuclear weapons in space or on the Moon was banned worldwide.
