But wait....After further review......
In 1949, the
Armour Research Foundation (ARF), based at the
Illinois Institute of Technology, began studying the effects of nuclear explosions on the environment. These studies would continue until 1962.
[2] In May 1958, ARF began covertly researching the potential consequences of an atomic explosion on the Moon. The main objective of the program, which ran under the auspices of the
United States Air Force, which had initially proposed it, was to cause a nuclear explosion that would be visible from Earth. It was hoped that such a display would boost the morale of the American people.
[3]
At the time of the project's conception, newspapers were reporting a rumor that the Soviet Union was planning to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. According to press reports in late 1957, an anonymous source had divulged to a
United States Secret Service agent that the Soviets planned to commemorate the anniversary of the
October Revolution by causing a nuclear explosion on the Moon to coincide with a
lunar eclipse on November 7. News reports of the rumored launch included mention of targeting the dark side of the terminator—Project A119 would also consider this boundary as the target for an explosion. It was also reported that a failure to hit the Moon would likely result in the missile returning to Earth.
[4]
A similar idea was put forward by
Edward Teller, the "father of the H-bomb", who, in February 1957, proposed the detonation of atomic devices both on and some distance from the lunar surface to analyze the effects of the explosion.
[5]
http://en.wikipedia....ki/Project_A119
The first idea of exploding a bomb on the lunar surface seems to be in Robert Goddard's "A Method for reaching extreme altitudes". Goddard investigated the possibility of reaching the Moon with a rocket loaded with photographer magnesium powder, in order to record the explosion made by the impact. Instead of carrying out a simple theoretical study, in October 1916 Goddard made an experiment to establish the minimum powder mass to be carried by the rocket. By observing at night from his Worcester home the magnesium flash made in an air evacuated glass ampule located some 3,600 meters away, he determined that the flash made by 0.0029 grams of magnesium was barely visible and the one made by 0.015 grams was plainly so.
From these data he calculated that, using a 30 cm diameter telescope to observe the impact, the rocket was to carry 1.2 kg of magnesium for the flash to be barely visible and 6.27 kg to be plainly so. To carry this mass to the moon, Goddard estimated that it was necessary to use a rocket of some fifteen tons launch mass, able to accelerate the payload to escape speed. Goddard himself noted that "the plan of sending a mass of flash powder to the surface of the moon, although a matter of much general interest, is not of obvious scientific importance". This was however the first idea of an interplanetary mission to do without of the presence of humans: the first "space probe".
Later, in the Forties, the German born popular science writer Willy Ley further perfected the Goddard idea. He noted in fact that if the terrestrial observers able to observe the lunar impact of the magnesium laden probe were incapacitated by bad weather, the impact may happen without any witness. To counter this problem Ley proposed the impact on the Moon of 0.5 kg of high explosive and 4.5 kg of white powder, possibly powdered glass that, once dispersed on the surface, would have formed a patch of surface more brilliant than the surroundings.
In 1945 US astronomer H. H. Nininger suggested the use of two new technologies developed during the most recent war, guided missiles and atomic weapons, to dislodge lunar soil samples and to carry them toward the Earth, thus providing an artificial imitation of what astronomers believed had happened during the formation of the larger craters or during the eruption of the lunar volcanoes, creating a class of natural glasses called tektites.
In 1957 Kraft Ehricke, an Atlas missile designer and Nobel prize George Gamow proposed a small probe called Cow (after a nursery rhyme) that was to fly by the Moon before returning to Earth one week after launch. A follow-on version was to be preceded by an atomic bomb that was to raise a cloud of vaporized rock. The second probe was then to fly through the cloud, thus returning lunar surface samples to Earth.
In October of the same year, JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) presented its idea of a lunar program that would overshadow Sputnik. The program was called Red Socks and it could include the detonation of an atom bomb on our natural satellite's surface, in order to collect, as Nininger had proposed, any lunar rock that would be hurled to our planet by the explosion and to produce, in the words of JPL's director Pickering to produce "beneficial psychological results".
As the first race to the Moon unfolded, both the USA and the USSR had plans to nuke the Moon.
In parallel with the Able probes' development, the US Air Force started a top secret project, called A119, described euphemistically as a "study of lunar research flights" and only revealed 42 years after its conception.
It was probably based on a still secret RAND Corporation study, started in 1956, aimed at putting a nuclear warhead on the Moon. The same idea was shared by Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb who in February 1957 proposed exploding an atomic bomb at some distance from the lunar surface to observe the fluorescence induced in it or even directly on the surface to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause. Moreover, after being mentioned in Project ``Red Socks'', the idea of the emphatically called ISBM (InterSpatial Ballistic Missile) was analyzed in some detail by engineers of Lockheed Space and Missiles Division who determined that a 11 kTon bomb carried by an Agena rocket would have had enough time to explode before being crushed in the impact with the Moon.
However, such a project would probably have been forgotten had the Soviet Union not declared an unilateral nuclear test ban on March 31, 1958. This ban was interrputed on September 30, announced by the United States on October 31 and finally accepted by the Soviet Union in December. The ban was supposed to lead to a total test ban but, for lack of an agreement, the Soviet Union resumed testing on September 1, 1960, followed by the United States four days later. Despite this, for almost two years the two superpowers did not explode a single nuclear weapon. In this climate of incertitude, it is not surprizing that the US military considered moving their own tests in space, giving them an aura of scientific respectabily. Project A119 was thus started by the US Air Force Special (i.e. nuclear) Weapons Center, its main aim being of sending to the Moon without any warning a fission atomic bomb to impress the Soviets and their allies.
Very few details of the project have been revealed, and the few ones mostly concern the scientific side. To the project in fact participated from the spring of 1958 a small group of scientists of the Armour Research Fondation of the Illinois Institute of Technology, providing scientifical consultancy on the mission. This group included many well known scientists such as Leonard Reiffel, project chief scientist and later to be the manned Apollo lunar missions scientific instrumentation manager, Gerard P. Kuiper, a Dutch born planetlogist and his doctorate student Carl Sagan, the future famous planetary astronomer, scientist popularizer and author of the science fiction novel Contact. Counting on the accuracy of the launcher, far too optimistically estimated as "a couple of miles" at the Moon's distance, it was decided to explode the bomb on the night side close to the terminator, in order to maximize visiblity. Whatever the yield of the bomb and contrary to Kuiper's calculations, the crater created by the explosion would not have been visible: a 1 kiloton bomb would have digged a 50 meters diameter crater and a 1 megaton a less than 400 meters diameter one. ..............
http://www.theliving...e_the_Moon.html
You choose what story to go by........
Sounds like some whack attempt to collect dust samples......
Yes, as utterly deranged as it may sound today, the United States Air Force actually had a top secret plan called Project A 119 in the 1950s. This Cold War scheme entailed detonating a nuclear weapon on the lunar surface in order to see how the mushroom cloud would expand and contract in a low gravity setting.
Even more interesting, a young
Carl Sagan was part of the project — the very man who would go onto champion nuclear disarmament and the
dangers of nuclear winter.
According to Space.com, he even later tried to use his research from the project to acquire an academic fellowship, possibly breaching national security in the process.
As far as benefits to science go, Sagan figured that the resulting dust clouds from the blast would yield a great deal of interesting soil data — including the possibility of organic material.
According to Scientific American, some scientists even recommended sending two rockets: the first to nuke the moon’s surface and the second to fly through the giant dust cloud to collect samples. Obviously, this would have likely even changed the way
the moon and its “face” appeared from Earth.
Fortunately, we never put Project A 119 into action, but the line of thinking follows an interesting scientific trend — one that I’ve discussed with fellow science blogger
Allison Loudermilk on a number of occasions. What is it about our desire to throw a nuke at something in the name of science?
http://blogs.howstuf...uclear-weapons/
A true story, twisted in so many ways......
Edited by Sakari, 26 November 2012 - 04:39 AM.
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Simbi Laveau, on 26 November 2012 - 02:48 AM, said:
