From Kyle Hill.

Could you see a nuclear explosion on the moon with the naked eye? That was the question posed by the United States military in the 1950s as the cold war was heating up and the space race between the US and the Soviet Union was in full swing.

Project A119, details of which were declassified in 2000, tasked scientists to “safely” target and hit the moon with a nuclear weapon in order to send a message to the USSR. We only discovered the details of this unconventional and bizarre plan 40 years later, via a posthumous biography…of the greatest science communicator to ever live: Carl Sagan. This episode of [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explores the true story of the plan to nuke the moon.

Watch the whole [HALF LIFE-HISTORIES] series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNg1m3Od-GgNmXngCCJaJBqqm-7wQqGAW

00:00 Intro
01:23 Rocket’s Red Scare
05:07 Prime Directive
08:12 Shock and Awe
11:23 Personal Voyage
15:09 Deterrence

SOURCES:
Research and Citation Compilation by: @adef

Barnett, Antony. “US Planned One Big Nuclear Blast for Mankind.” The Guardian, 13
May 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2000/may/14/spaceexploration.theobserver.

Broad, William J. “U.S. Planned Nuclear Blast on the Moon, Physicist Says.” The New
York Times, 16 May 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20080521120641/http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE7DC113BF935A25756C0A9669C8B63.

Chyba, Christopher. “An exobiologist’s life search.” Nature, vol. 401, 28 Oct. 1999, pp.
857–858, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/44716.

eukaryote. “Carl Sagan, Nuking the Moon, and Not Nuking the Moon.” LessWrong, 12
Apr. 2024,
www.lesswrong.com/posts/hwtt9zM3MxoKnwgbd/carl-sagan-nuking-the-moon-a
nd-not-nuking-the-moon.

Myler, Joseph L. “Latest Red Rumor: They’ll Bomb Moon.” The Pittsburgh Press, 1
Nov. 1957, pp. 25.

Piesing, Mark. “The Crazy Plan to Explode a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon.” BBC News,
BBC, 8 May 2023,
www.bbc.com/future/article/20230505-the-crazy-plan-to-explode-a-nuclear-bomb-
on-the-moon.

Reiffel, L. “Sagan breached security by revealing US work on a lunar bomb project.”
Nature, vol. 405, 04 May 2000, pp.
13, https://doi.org/10.1038/35011148.

Reiffel, et al. “UNCLASSIFIED: AD 425380 – A Study of Lunar Research Flights.”
Headquarters of the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force
Base, NM & the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology, 19 June 1959, https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0425380/mode/2up.

“U.S. Weighed A-Blast on Moon in 1950s.” Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, 18
May 2000, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-18-mn-31395-story.html.

Zheleznyakov, Aleksandr. The E-4 Project – Exploding a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon,
Space History Notes, www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/E3/E3orig.htm.

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