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Air Force Had Plans to Nuke Moon
posted: 11:16 am ET
14 May 2000
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Sagan Worked on Air Force Plan to Nuke Moon The U.S. Air Force developed a top-secret Cold War plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon in the 1950s. In a letter to the journal Nature, physicist Leonard Reiffel, leader of the effort which was called Project A 119, wrote that the Air Force wanted to explore the effects of exploding a nuclear bomb on the moons face. The Air Force wanted the explosion to be clearly visible from Earth. Reiffel wrote that the military leaders did not seem concerned with the loss to science that would have resulted from a large atomic explosion on the moons surface. Let alone what it may have done to the appearance of the "man in the moon." Part of the team researching the hypothetical explosion was a young Carl Sagan, who was recruited to study how the mushroom cloud would expand and collapse under the moons lighter gravity. Sagan proposed that a legitimate scientific purpose for the explosion could have been examining the cloud for possible organic material. Years later, Sagan apparently presented some of the results of his research on the project in an application for an academic fellowship. Reiffel believes that by doing so Sagan breached national security, as the primary secret of the project was its very existence. This breach of security was discussed in a recent biography of the astronomer, but was not detailed in that book. Striking the moon with one of the then-available Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) was entirely feasible, Reiffel wrote, to an accuracy within a couple of miles (kilometers).
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