There was someone who wanted to go a bit farther than just a bomb or two [1]. He wanted to completely destroy the moon.
That's 33.33 quadrillion GWh. Or about two trillion times the annual energy consumption of Earth.
If we somehow harnessed windfall energy on that scale, hmmm what to do, what to do... let's blow up the moon!
There is no way to store or transport the energy though, it corresponds to hundreds of millions of tons of mass fused every second. Instead you would have to somehow beam or guide the full power of the sun towards the moon for several minutes. Pretty cool light show, for those who dare to look up... but don't miss!
So what you're saying is... we need to build a Death Star.
Smith was the "trope-maker" for much of modern space-opera & SF. And as his stories went on, the scope of combat and forces involved just kept getting bigger. The Death Star is barely a capital ship by the standards of later Lensmen books, where a task force will regularly involve hundreds of immense ships, plantary masses worth of antimatter, and squadrons of armed and mobile planets. ("Starkiller Base" eat your heart out.) By the very end, exotic-matter planets were being used as ammunition.
That made me laugh.
I wonder if this is where Neal Stephenson got the idea for Seveneves which has the opening line
"The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason."
As it's currently structured there are three objections.
1. We couldn't do it.
2. It would have disastrous side effects.
3. It wouldn't fix the problem you're trying to solve, and it would in fact make it worse.
> And if it helps, he made it Over fifty years later and nobody thinks about nuking the moon very often anymore. Good job, Sagan.
Mission failed, I am now thinking about nuking. A lot. Makes me wish I was a senior DoE officer in the 50s when you could nuke stuff to see what happened when stuff got nuked.
For a man who gained infamy for wanting to blow up the moon, his publications are on relatively boring topics in advanced math.
(it's not important to the story)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Radiation and high energy particles left in orbit destroyed one third of all satellites at the time after the next few months as they passed through that cloud.
DOH