The plan to explode a nuclear bomb on the Moon
bbc.com
bbc.com
Otherwise I found this quote interesting:
> Incredibly, one scientist enabling this horrific scheme was future visionary Carl Sagan. In fact, the existence of the project was only discovered in the 1990s because Sagan had mentioned it on an application to an elite university.
It is surprising that Cark Sagan would have anything to do with something like this (but again, a zeitgeist compels all of us to do things that won't stand the test of time). It is also concerning to think that there might be projects like this that never gets revealed to the public - until it's too late.
Also, without making a big spoiler, read Silo. It shows a very relevant development.
I don't think we need to wait for the future, I think most normal people living now would already consider this entire situation crazy. The situation and context is obviously complex, but I doubt there are many people outside governments who think a WMD arms race is a good idea.
In a world where the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)¹ was the plan for decades, involving vapourising thousands upon thousands of targets, on a pre-set and inflexible list, including virtually all the cities in Russia and most of China with an estimated death toll near 300 million, this probably one of the less horrific plans. Still hare-brained, but at least not outright murderous.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operationa...
This was known to be an underestimate as US targetting ignored some relatively unpredictable effects of nuclear weapons - their thermal radiation.
It's sad that people often evaluate strategic military matters without applying even the minimal level of game theory.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strath_Committee and that is for a fairly mild strike of "only" 10 bombs.
Imagine a large combined bomb and asteroid at rest before it explodes, so combined momentum has to stay at zero after.
If explosion happens when not combined, particles from the bomb hit the asteroid and transfer their momentum to the rocket.
Nuclear weapons can do interesting things like fusion, but it isn't going to create persistent mass when detonated.
The actual proposed weapon was a W25, with a yield of 1.7 kilotons. That size of weapon is so small may non-nuclear explosions eclipse it.
> Nuclear weapons will destroy a ship if they detonate exceedingly close to it. But if it is further away than about a kilometer, it won't do much more than singe the paint job and blind a few sensors. And in space a kilometer is pretty close range.
> Please understand: I am NOT saying that nuclear warheads are ineffective. I am saying that the amount of damage they inflict falls off very rapidly with increasing range. At least much more rapidly than with the same sized warhead detonated in an atmosphere.
> But if the nuke goes off one meter from your ship, your ship will probably be vaporized. Atmosphere or no.
> But what if the Moon Armstrong stepped onto was scarred by huge craters and poisoned from the effects of nuclear bombardment?
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-moon.html
"New measurements show moon has hazardous radiation levels"
Astronauts would get 200 to 1,000 times more radiation on the moon than what we experience on Earth—or five to 10 times more than passengers on a trans-Atlantic airline flight, noted Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber of Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany.
Also, the hand wringing about adding a crater to the Moon’s surface is just laughable. The whole surface is cratered, a tiny man made one wouldn’t even be noticeable.
"Did they ever think to try this suspicious idea, Yes."
"Did anything as such ever occur? Don't be proposetheorist!"
I mean, take everything you've ever heard about the importance of the ozone layer, and everything you've ever heard about the importance of the magnetic shield the Earth has, add a few more little effects you may not even be thinking about like the effect the sheer bulk of atmosphere above us has on screening things, and you're getting to the baseline of what space is like. Add in the fact that sometimes space gets even worse courtesy of solar storms.
(For reference, the International Space Station is actually under the van Allen belts, so it still is substantially protected from radiation, though not entirely. Go above those and the situation gets much worse.)
If there are people or substantial infrastructure on the moon at the time, there are plenty of other good reasons not to light off nukes on the moon unrelated to the radiation. While some of the negative effects nukes have on Earth are the result of its relatively thick atmosphere, there are also ways in which the atmosphere is protective and limits the effect of nukes. Without any atmosphere, all material ejected from the nuke site does not lose any of its kinetic energy. Thus, a single surface nuke can pepper the entire surface of any airless planet with material below the escape velocity of the relevant planet. The moon's escape velocity is 2.38 km/s, or as we commonly measure bullet velocities, ~7,800ft/s. Modern high-power rifles reach ~3,900ft/s, so a single surface nuke on the moon potentially peppers the entire surface with high-powered bullets. I don't know how dense such a peppering would be without much more math, but at least some amount of material will go over the entire surface. Granted that anything built on the surface of the moon must be resilient against micrometeorites, that may still overwhelm such defenses, and anyone mobile on the surface would be in danger with little time to react (though not zero time).
The Castle Bravo test produced the highest fallout levels in history. The detonation produced an explosion approximately 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, equal to 15 Mt of TNT.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130927145851/http://nuclearwea...
The history of nuclear weapons is full of stories like this, where something crazy is proposed or prescribed by policy but ultimately cooler heads prevailed.
It's not widely known for example that during the Cuban missile crisis nuclear weapons were deployed and Russian forces were told to use them if pressed. The U.S. did not know this, and pressed, heavily, but ultimately Russian forces opted not to use them against their orders.
It's also worth noting - again, since the article doesn't - the Soviets had a corresponding project and in the end came to the same conclusion.
As the article states China may indeed have or be toying with this idea as well, but in the end will in all probability come to the same conclusion.
I'm reminded of a Q&A Putin did in the mid 2000s where a student asked him what Russia would do if provoked too much, and in a rare candid moment Putin responded despite all the rhetoric countries may throw out, the truth is no one wants nuclear war and in such a war there are no winners.
> The premise of Space: 1999 centres on the plight of the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, a scientific research centre on the Moon. Humanity had been storing its nuclear waste in vast disposal sites on the far side of the Moon, but when an unknown form of electromagnetic radiation is detected, the accumulated waste reaches critical mass and causes a massive thermonuclear explosion on 13 September 1999. The force of the blast propels the Moon like an enormous booster rocket, hurling it out of Earth orbit and into deep space at colossal speed, thus stranding the 311 personnel stationed on Alpha.