They were going to nuke the moon in the 1950s

I just found this out last night. I was reading through some old documents and found out that in the 1950s, the air force was planing to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon in the 1950s during the cold war era or something.

Heres the link:

www.space.com...

Very interesting stuff. I guess now we have treaties to prevent this type of thing. Not that we would follow those treaties if we didn't want to, but still.

The only other launch of an atomic bomb other than the two on
Japan was with the atomic cannon.
That landed back on earth, so to say.
Launching a missile with an atomic warhead may never have been
done except for atmospheric testing.

They always say the accuracy thing buy they are afraid the
launch to the moon might come back to the earth.
We do not have control of gravity as saucer pilots and doubt
they will carry any bombs.

ya, but one the main reason why i posted this was because, NASA is planning to bomb the moon on oct 9th.

I really think this thread should not have died this quick

Yep. Like many crazy ideas, this one was scrapped.
en.wikipedia.org...

Though humorous, this Website has a practical reason to nuke the moon that, eerily, almost makes sense, towards world peace. With the USSR off the table as a balanced super power, I dunno, I think this could actually work, though it would never happen It is interesting to see some of the parallels, though, between the Space.com article and this one.

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Read the rest for the full world peace plan

reply to post by ckrules


Well, it's true that LCROSS will impact the moon on Oct 9 with a big hit, but I wouldn't consider it a "bomb". There are no explosvies involved as far as I know.

[edit on 9-7-2009 by Zarniwoop]

reply to post by ckrules

I really think this thread should not have died this quick...

I think it needed to die.

Here's a nail for the coffin: According to the link, they claimed an ICBM might have been successfully launched to the Moon?!?? In the 1950s?
(Note the 'B' in ICBM? Means 'ballistic')

Were they nuts?

Let's see....ICBM....sub-orbital. Maximum velocity, and total fuel onboard? Insufficient to achieve Earth escape velocity.

1950s. Hardly able to achieve Earth orbit, much less escape.

Seems Carl Sagan didn't have his head screwed on just yet!!!

Flight phases

The following flight phases can be distinguished:

boost phase — 3 to 5 minutes (shorter for a solid rocket than for a liquid-propellant rocket); altitude at the end of this phase is typically 150 to 400 km depending on the trajectory chosen, typical burnout speed is 7 km/s....

en.wikipedia.org...

To leave planet Earth an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is required...

en.wikipedia.org...

But, why use logic when hysteria might suffice instead?


[edit on 9 July 2009 by weedwhacker]

Originally posted by weedwhacker
Let's see....ICBM....sub-orbital. Maximum velocity, and total fuel onboard? Insufficient to achieve Earth escape velocity.

As does our current shuttle. However, at the time, the Apollo rocket was available or soon to be available and could have held a nuke instead of a bunch of guys in a metal cone. The technology was there to make it happen then, using the same concept as that of an ICBM. It's not here today, though. Unfortunately.

reply to post by junglejake


Sorry, jake, unlikely in the 1950s.

The Saturn 1B, precursor to the Saturn V, only capable of payloads to Earth orbit:

en.wikipedia.org...

AS-201 AS-201 February 26, 1966 First test flight. Sub-orbital Command/Service Module test.

The Saturn V:
en.wikipedia.org...

SA-501 Apollo 4 November 9, 1967 First test flight, a complete success

The first unmanned lunar mission took place in 1959 (check out Luna 2 of the E-1A series). That it was Soviet is not a huge concern -- with the amount of spies both nations had among one another, I'm sure the Luna mission was a great boon to the Apollo mission.

It's quite possible the mission would have failed, but considering the speed in which we went from sub-orbital flight to manned moon flight, we probably could have cranked something out quite a bit faster if we didn't give a rip if the payload survived or not.

Naturally, though, this is all assumption. We can't as of yet, go back and change history and find out what would have happened. Yet