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Back in the 1950s, they wanted to blow up the moon! Their goal: To intimidate the Soviet Union.
The Air Force would not comment on this report. Their refusal should surprise no one. After all, who would want defend a truly stupid idea like this one?
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12 Comments
Given the mass of the moon and the number of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles available during the 1950s and 1960s, if Curtis LeMay actually considered doing it he would have discovered it beyond US resources.
This doesn’t pass the “simple understanding of high school physics” test.
Were the leadership of the US Air Force looney enough to ask about this as an option — well, just read a biography of Curtis Lemay.
I wouldn’t think it possible, but…
Even detonating a few bombs on the moon was a crazy idea.
Fool: “Let us send a massive amount of dust and debris to Earth’s outer atmosphere.”
Satan: “Good idea.”
USAF is famous for its whack jobs. Evangelical 6000 year old Earth, Jesus riding dinosaurs type whack jobs.
I don’t think the debris from any nukes set off on the moon would have made it past the moon’s gravity well. But maybe.
What would a thermonuclear device detonated on the moon look like from night time Earth? A brief, barely visible pinpoint of orange light? Assuming clear skies. Hardly impressive.
So crazy it was (1) never started and (2) lost in the classified maze.
It’s not altogether clear from any of the articles what the purported purpose of such an excercise would be. In addition to the physics not passing the smell test, the tactical objective is not clear.
In the 1950s, NASA did research on a nuclear-powered plane and a thermo-nuclear powered space vehicle. But those studies both concluded that the projects were unfeasible.
A lot of strange “what if we did this” modeling goes in in engineering.
Also, the general knowledge of the hazards of radiation were not well known to the scientific community until the end of the 1950s. In the early 1950s, kids routinely had their feet X-rayed at shoe stores when they were buying shoes, for example. So the kicking up of dust and debris did not seem a big deal. Likely, Sagan’s role was to remind them that with the reduced gravity of the moon, stuff didn’t automatically fall back to the surface the same way that it did on the earth. And with no atmospheric drag, any particles accelerated with an escape velocity from the moon would keep going until captured by the gravitational field of another object.
As for the effect on earth, given the power of atomic weapons in the 1950s, one or more explosions on the moon would likely have created one spectacular meteor shower when the dust fragments hit earth’s atmosphere.
There were not sufficient numbers of nuclear weapons by the 1960s to create a massive amount of dust and debris. And also, in the 1950s, not a whole lot was known about the ionosphere and other layers of the earth’s atmosphere beyond that implicated in the weather.
The same Curtis LeMay who said Kennedy’s decision not to invade Cuba in 1962 and risk(or, as we now know, cause) a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a “the greatest defeat in our history”? THAT Curtis LeMay?
The same Curtis LeMay who LBJ forced into retirement in 1965 because he was certifiably batshit crazy?
I have no problem believing he proposed nuking the moon. I also have no problem believing Eisenhower wasn’t at all interested in doing so.
The strategic and tactical objectives were identical, I would guess.
The fact that scientists and engineers entertain a lot of “what if” conjectures does not mean that some of those tasks are sane. Why consider creating Ice-9? Why create nuclear weapons if one knew in advance what their existence entailed?
The same Curtis Lemay who led the firebombing of Dresden. The same Curtis Lemay who ran for vice-president with George Wallace in 1968.
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The novel’s premise is to take something that does occur (a polymorph of ice) and posit its occurrence as a runaway chain reaction. It turns pages but has no basis in science or engineering.
Physicists in the US, knowing what was happening in Germany and knowing that some key physicists (Werner Heisenberg in particular) were part of the Nazi war effort were concerned that Germany was building a bomb based on a runaway chain-reaction of fission in uranium (demonstrated under controlled circumstances by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in 1942). They asked Albert Einstein to write a letter to FDR. The result was the Manhattan Project. Until they started on the Manhattan Project, they could estimate roughtly the amount of energy released in a theoretical nuclear weapon but could not predict what that meant in terms of physical destruction or byproducts or side effects.
The weapon was created out of the fear that the Nazis would create it first.
No one grasped the political consequences of nuclear weapons until they were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it took from 1945 until 1962 for that to become clear enough for the US and Soviet Union to start negotiating limits on nuclear weapons. And for the UN to pursue a non-proliferation treaty.
Sometimes the insanity of something is noticed in hindsight. Take interstate highways, shopping malls, and suburbs for example.
I used Ice-Nine as a source of an analogy and as a bit of hyperbole which highlights the point I wanted to make: That some acts or projects are foolish per se.
Nazi fear may give a veneer of rationality to the Manhattan Project and its consequences. But the creation of nuclear weapons was insane in any case. Nazi Germany was an instance of collective insanity, and its pursuit of such a weapon reflects that fact.
What was insane were mid-1950s “Atoms for Peace” proposals for corporations to use nuclear explosions for large-scale construction projects. It took about three years for engineers to ask the question, “But what happens to the radioactive fallout?”
As for the pursuit of nuclear weapons and Nazi insanity, the scientists who fronted for the group writing a letter to FDR were Jewish and had good reasons not to want Nazi hegemony to extend farther than western and central Europe. At the time, and as I said until 1962, nuclear weapons were seen as a pragmatic military response in wartime. It began in 1957 when the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy was founded and launched its first advertisement calling for a ban on nuclear testing in the New York Times. SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze movement and became the Peace Action Network. In the UK, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had Bertrand Russell as an advocate, also started in 1957. It took five years of organizing plus the Cuban Missile Crisis to get the issue in front of the public. And that came at the same time that nuclear testing was shown to be contaminating the nation’s milk supply with Strontium 90.
The issue is not so much which projects are foolish per se but which ones pose serious risks to human beings, the ecosystem, or both (and it usually is both).
Sorry to report that in the early 1950s, my cousin-in-law Thomas Carver invented the Atomic Clock, which was one of the first, if not THE first ‘Atoms for Peace’ device, although – I’m glad to report – his invention didn’t involve splitting any atoms, just channeling those particles emitted due to radioactivity. By the way, the clock is still ticking.