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U.S. Had Plan To Nuke The Moon
Jeffy was one several people this weekend who writes: "According to this article, The U.S. planned on detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon in the fifties to 'one up' the USSR and sway public opinion on the States' military might. An interesting twist to the story is that Carl Sagan was hired to help do the math to make sure the explosion was big enough to see from earth." Well, this isn't really news for nerds, but the whole idea behind nuking the moon strikes me as such a sad commentary on the Cold War that I had to post. The thinking behind this was such a pissing match it astounds me -- but here it is.
Well, we can see you would never make it in the nuclear arms business. In the day, Teller would have denounced you as a traitor for such soft-heartedness.
No, what you want is to set off a bomb designed to release a big load of neutrons deep in a salt mine. That shoots into the atmosphere an enormous jet of vaporized radioactive sodium. Short half-life, high, high radiation level, plus, sodium being such an active ion the uptake in organisms is really really good. That'll teach those f*&^ing Roosians to f%$# with Hungary!
Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Much of the same information was embedded into Dean Ing's novella "Pulling Through", including a huge appendix aimed at helping the reader survive.
What does one set the microwave for when nukeing a moon? Is it like a big baked potato or a bag of popcorn? And for how long?
You are aware that you just contradicted yourself right? Naval buildup was avoided by Bismarck inorder to not antagonize Britain, a policy discontinued by Wilhelm II in an effort to cut in on the imperialist game monopolized by France and Britain. Bismarck had always felt that German Unification atained, Germany could only lose if another war were to be fought. Now im not really a great fan of Bismarck's, but to blame his diplomacy makes no sense.
--Gil
, the biggest radioactive event of the 20th century by a far cry was Mt. St. Helens. I don't think so. Weren't Pinatubo or other non-US explosions much larger than MSHelens? Like other Washington state products with the initials MS, the marketing outruns the reality.
You are a truely stupid person! Hmmmm, as i recall the nukes were used well after the Japaneese (sp?) had been pushed back to the mainland islands. The nukes where used to avoid a costly land invasion of the mainlands (remember they tended to never surrender). At the time they figured that our lives where more impt. than theirs and this would save american lives, which as i recall were only in danger b/c they shot first. But then agian i may be wrong about Pearl Harbor . I really don't recall us having to many "embarassing military defeats" after Midway.
It isn't necessarily dangerous. A deep slit trench will protect you from prompt radiation, thermal and blast effects. Next step, be upwind or evacuate to avoid the fallout footprint. I've seen films of troops advancing to "ground zero" shortly after a test, that is really stupid.
Furthermore, the use of nuclear weapons was perfectly justifible as a means of doing one thing: end the war with the minimum number of US casualties. The US government rightfully had little concern for the loss of Japanese life. They were, after all, the enemy. There are plenty of other, more political, motivations that you are free to disagree with. Specifically, that the people will not long tolerate a war where their country is suffering horrible losses, and that in turn is bad for the political future of that nation's leaders.
I suppose the part you most clearly forgot is expressed well by an author who I have forgotten: "It is good that war is so terrible, or we would become too fond of it."
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
ssia
I refer you to the Monroe Doctrine for a description of American policy regarding its sphere of influence.
Does anyone remenber the sci-fi tv series space 1999? In the series a huge radioactive dump explodes and acts like a huge nuclear enjine propelling the moon out of orbit in to the unknown.
It guess the rationalle of US military was to do something like that, so that the communists would have no moon to look at.
To tell you the truth, I don't give a shit about freedom as long as I've got my stereo, my compact disc collection, my computer, and all the sex I could want.
Try and blow a nuke anywhere near my little piece of heaven and I'll show you the price of freedom...
I spent the latter part of the Cold War in the Army, and I distinctly remember expecting the balloon to go up sometime during my lifetime.
And as an Armoured Recce guy, I had to memorize and _keep_ memorized Soviet ORBATS, tactics, and weapon/vehicle capabilities so that I'd recognise the bad guys when they came calling.
But a couple of years ago, after the Wall fell, I had an opportunity to meet one of my counterparts from the Red Army, and we got to talking about "old times". And what he told me was that they were all waiting for NATO to invade _them_!
And he managed to give great examples of our "threatening stance"
A minor lesson in tactics - the nature of modern armoured warfare is that it is impossible to contain a localized bit of ground. The enemy can concentrate his forces and always overwhelm localized defenders. If you share a border with a bad guy, and you each have 1000 tanks, then placing your tanks at equal intervals along the border will do nothing when the enemy throws all 1000 tanks at one spot.
Accordingly, the way you defend against armoured units is to place lightweight screening units up front, and have progressively larger and heavier units staged behind them. The screening units make contact, and report back to the heavy units, who then determine where the attackers are going and counterattack in mass.
It's called "defense in depth". To defend against Divisional-level assaults requeres about 100km of depth.
However, the West German wasn't too keen on the idea of the first 100km of their country being given up by default and used as a battlefield. They wanted the invaders stopped at the border.
Well, NATO knew that this just wasn't going to happen, but political expediancy required them to come up with a solution. And the solution they came up with was that as soon as the balloon went up, they would _immediately_ invade East Germany and attempt to penetrate 100 km in and set up the defensive screen. Tactical nukes would be used to blunt any thrusts pushing into West Germany, and the units pushing into East Germany would be used to cut off the attackers.
What this looks like on the ground are large mobile units massed close to the border - exactly what an invasion force would look like. Because it _was_ an invasion force.
Now the Soviets had more experience with large-scale armoured combat than anyone. They KNOW what is required to defend against armour. And every time NATO would tell them "we're just going to defend ourselves against agression" the Soviet generals would look at the troop distributions in West Germany and go "We know what defenses look like, and those are NOT defensive formations" - and they'd go make another 10000 tanks.
The two of us discussed this for quite some time, and when we finally understood each other, we had a good laugh over it all.
That's not to say that the Soviets weren't very interested in promoting Communism - they were, and they persued that agressively. But they never seriously considered Napoleanesque annexation by force of the whole of Europe like we feared.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The idea was not that dumb, actually. It was a way to demonstrate that the space probe indeed reached the moon which was not easy in those day. Until now some people are unconvinced that Apollo reached the moon --- Moon rocks, videos, radio signals received from the Moon by everyone and his uncle apparently not enough.
BTW, USSR had similar project which, thankfully, also died.
This country is fucked up. Not as fucked up as most, but still very fucked up. I'd say we need another revolution here, but they're in the process of taking our guns away anyway.
--
I believe the concern was starting a fusion reaction, not "burning all the oxygen."
You're right about the cloud--I thought the same thing when I read it. I assume that's an example of the reporter making up something that he thought sounded plausible (I don't know what the approved reportorial terminology for this is...). If not, then the article is probably a complete fabrication.
Incidentally, someone I don't remember once had a science fiction short story where a Coca Cola analog puts their logo on the face of the moon by spreading lamp black ballistically over the entire visible face. Cooler than doing it with a laser....
I heard the people they (the US) were fighting against carried out grusome expermiments on humans, and were allies with another country that was busy killing off an entire race of people. I also heard the decision was made to avoid having to kill off each and every one of the enemy, not b/c they were losing.
So when did the United States occupy Canda and Mexico?
Oh right...they didn't. But the Soviet Union did occupy Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia as well as annex Georgia, the Ukraine, Moldova and a host of other nations while it strove to make sure it's neighnours behaved. Didn't the Soviet Union occupy both Hungary and Chechzlovakia?
US Doctrine at the time was "Containment" originally that was supposed to be economic...but it was twisted around to become military. So we had the war in Vietnam...and we supported the Afgans so that Pakistain wouldn't be the next "domino" to fall. And we had that little invasion of Granada too.
So...no the United States didn't follow the same doctrine as the Soviet Union did...or China is trying to do now with it's...we *have* to take Taiwan back stance.
"The Russians and Americans get into a huge space-based arms race, contaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium. Space science is set back a hundred years, due to radiation affecting radio astronomy, planetary destruction rendering space probes useless, and the impossibility of ever landing humans on any other world."
Hey come on, that would just make them easier to see using a radio telescope! They would positively GLOW...
But seriously, I think you overestimate the power that people can have with nuclear weapons, and the harm they do. There are plenty of worse things that have happened to the earth, such as big chunks of iron falling out of the sky.
In fact, including things like Hiroshima and Chornobyl, the biggest radioactive event of the 20th century by a far cry was Mt. St. Helens. Even when we play with nukes, humanity can never be as powerful as good ol' mom nature.
Just putting things in perspective.
While the flash might have been big and bright enough to be seen from Earth, would there have really been a mushroom cloud? Isn't the shape of a mushroom cloud dependant on atmosphere and convection?
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
I'd guess that the main problem would be in terms of sleep patterns of certain animals. The albedo of the moon's natural surface is really pretty low (somewhere around 0.15, from memory). If this were increased to near 1.0, the full moon would be very bright. We already know that some species are sensitive to the moon's cycle (look at seahorses, for instance). I'd not like to predict how a brighter moon would affect these.
Second, picture this. The Russians discover that a quadrillion-tonne nuclear warhead has been fitted to a rocket. Their spy-planes discover that the rocket is on the launch pad, target unknown. The Russians have a total xenophobia of America (and likewise in reverse). The Russians are aware of American military leaders advising an attack on Russia, before Russia got too big. The only weapons you have, capable of stopping an attack by America on Russia are nuclear missiles. If you were in the Russian's shoes, what would YOU do?
The Americans miscalculate the position of the moon, and the rocket goes into a free return path. Space debris, radiation and other nasties, by this time, have destroyed any self-destruct system. (Assuming any was installed. This WAS early on, remember!) The rocket detonates on impact with Earth, wiping out whatever continent it strikes. Because of a total clamp-down on any information regarding the missile, surviving nations declare all-out world war, using whatever conventional and nuclear weapons that existed. Life on Earth is obliterated. For ever.
Another possibility. Terrorists capture the warhead, and threaten to detonate it. Because of the secrecy involved, the security forces involved in negotiation and/or attack are NOT advised that the warhead is nuclear, OR of the capability of the warhead. The forces storm the terrorists, who detonate the bomb. The world dies in unspeakable agony. The End.
The size of the warhead is miscalculated. The missile strikes a fissure in the moon. (The moon cooled VERY quickly, when it formed, maybe in less than a year. That's going to make for very low-grade rock.) The moon is literally blown apart. Earth is struck by massive rocks, wiping out half the population. The loss of the moon destabilises the Earth, which wobbles wildly. Seasons cease to exist, and all life dies in a catastrophic ice-age.
The Americans succeed in hitting the moon. The moon survives. The Russians (who, at that time, had vastly superior space technology) launch an even bigger rocket and an even bigger nuclear warhead into space. Repeat all of the above.
The Russians and Americans get into a huge space-based arms race, contaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium. Space science is set back a hundred years, due to radiation affecting radio astronomy, planetary destruction rendering space probes useless, and the impossibility of ever landing humans on any other world. Humanity is confined to Earth and dies of stagnation and/or over-population and/or exhaustion of resources.
In the end, humanity has only reached the year 2000 because of the FAILURE of projects like this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
First, rockets back then were *gasp*! less reliable than they are now. A fault on launch, with a bomb capable of an explosion that could have been seen a few =million= miles away would have turned more than the launch-pad into toast.
Decently designed nuclear devices are not nearly that easy to set off. Even badly designed ones don't deliver full yield unless they are intentionally set off. Nuclear bombs are NOT like regular explosives...they don't just go off...the ignition sequence is very delicate...if you get it wrong usually all tha happens is you spray your nuclear materials around the general vicinity. You do not get an explosion.
Remember that several actual, live, exploding nuclear warheads HAVE been launched on rockets over the years. The US has even suffered a launch failure of at least one of these. (During the Starfish operation...one of the high-altitude shots' boosters exploded on the pad. The warhead did not go off.)
Also recognise that it wouldn't take a very large device to be visible from the earth. 5 to 10 MT should do it. Not a small explosion, by any means, but not quite big as some that were tested on earth in the 50s...
Humanity is confined to Earth and dies of stagnation...
Gee, some might argue that this is already happening... We haven't advanced much beyond 60s era technology, after all...
And these guys figuring out the yield of a nuke have been doing it pretty accurately ever since Trinity.
Apart from that whole sordid Ivy Mike affair...
I remember seeing a report MANY years ago on 60 minutes. It was a really powerfull story. I think the town was called *sound it out, my Russian spelling is horrible* "Sink-a-pal-a-tane" A good portion of the tests were to see the effects of radiation on people. I remember one case where they actually changed the direction of flow of a river with a nuke. Then they had russian soldiers build a dam on the river to see how the radiation effected them.
Another part to the story dealt with a *museaum of horrors* kinda place with mutated children that were preserved. Most were still-born. I still have the immage in my head of a infant who possesed no legs but had what appeared to be a fish tail. And one of the children walking around the village possesed no eyes and was very baddly deformed.
Radiation can do some horrible things.
Because when Canada was very young, the Great Lakes were the most economical method of travel. So, most of the population is along the St. Lawrence river and Great Lakes. Not to mention that further north, in the Canadian Shield, the ground is infertile (read: rock).
I thought the beer in Canada was better. . .
You thought correctly :)
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I think you missed Vonnegut's point in that quote; he didn't say "Hiroshima" but "Nagasaki". Hiroshima would have been enough to secure a surrender - the lesser-evil-than-conventional-warfare argument might wash there, if it can at all. The war was effectively over after the first bomb, ergo Nagasaki was a weapons test (designed to test a different bomb but especially the different terrain). And that's obscene.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
"Here we are the site of the site of the latest nuclear test. As you can see the tremendous forces unleased have transformed this once prestine wilderness into a barren moonscape.
....Hang on...."
Why must it always be haters of Christianity? This is a peculiar facet of right wing Christianity that I do not understand. Just because someone isn't Christian doesn't mean they hate Cristianity. Most non Christians in the US take a "you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone" attitude, the problems is that they are never left alone. Certainly there are a few "haters of Christianity" out there, but this "If you are not with us, you are against us" cliche has got to go
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Screw 26, I want a 30 hour day. We need to hurry up and get colonizing lots of planets so we can all choose a planet that's has a day length we'd enjoy.
Intolerant people should be shot.
As regards blowing up the moon, I found this formula lying around:
/kg^2.
The total energy E required to completely disrupt a uniform spherical body of mass M and radius R is equal to 0.6 G * M^2 / R where G is Newton's gravitational constant, 6.673x10^-11 N m^2
--Sam L-L
I see it now, the Government clamps down on slashdot and prevents the creation of any new comment threads. Existing threads become immensense cascades and are linked under multiple different storys. Invading aliens become confused and decide that humans are too complicated to invade, fearing the wrath of the elusive grits trolls with the power to turn Natalie Portman to stone.
Wow, glad we don't see many stories on brain surgery, as we would have armchair neuroscientists crawling out of the woodwork. But get a good rocket science post and here comes 'Midvale School for the Gifted' students to the rescue.Here a few counterpoints.
P2 - To quote Psion: "some of your other speculations just don't work." Your speculation on high profile being some type of defense is a led zepplin. Don't you know that every single one of the rockets launched containing 'animal test subjects' was just a cover for spy cameras??? They were incredibly high profile missions, while doing extreme covert intelligence gathering. Do you actually believe Rusia would believe the US if it had broadcast: 'Live tonight! 250 Mton Warhead to be detonated on Moon at 9pm eastern!' Hell no, that would just give worldwide coverage of Moscow disappearing at 5am local, after a convienant error in guidence, all on live TV and radio. Handilly neutralizing every single enemy of the US, and probably every ally too.
As for turning back, why the Tachy's Bronze Nose would you allow the US to get first strike? If I'm a Russian General, I send in one lone plane equiped with a small nuke to take that baby out on the pad. You go in low, under radar, drop your small nuke and climb at 45 degrees like hell's gate is opening behind you, cause it is. Thsu you avoid radar going in, and will be invisble in the EMP wake on the ay out, maybe even the crew survives long enough to get medals back in Moscow. "Glory to you comrade!"
As for stupid stunts perpatrated on NATO, my favorite was a 'leaked' film reel from Yugoslavia that perported to show Russian agents recovering several filing cabinents full of Nazi agents dosiers that infiltrated the Allies. Scared NATO into doing some extreme spring cleaning, all for naught.
P3 - As for the miscaculation of the position of large celestial objects, actaully small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is. The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip. You don't so much aim, as throw yourself in the path of Moon.
For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit. This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. And while it may take awhile (1-1,000 years) it will eventually come back home.
As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere.
It would take awhile for the nuke to reach the Moon, as in several days, so most likely the self-destruct mechanism would be very complex for the time to prevent the Russians or others from prematurely detonating it. You would have every ham-radio with a diretional antenna pointed at it, sending every signal they can think of. As for rates of self-destruct failure, I once again refer you to the offices of NASA for statistics.
For the method of detonation, it would probably be a variant of the radar based proximinty (sp?) fuse used in WW2. As for going for a air or land detonation I can't guess, air does more damage, but a land explosion would probably show up better at Earth.
P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above. But please recall, an explosion visable on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty.
P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth with the centerpoint a random location and you have a pretty good chance of hitting something important to someone. How bout we go share a coconut on Bikini Island? Would you stand idly around while a guy on your block used a howitzer and accidentally blew up the empty lot next to you? Even though you don't have the firepower, you could surely gather everyon else in the neighborhood and kick his ass.
P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon of about a quarter of the distance to the Earth for the Earth's gravity to be greater and draw it back here. It has recently come to general acceptance that a lot more materail is ejected into outerspace after a meteor collision, and the Moon does't have any atmosphere to slow particlates down.
P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated. Earth is funny in that it has had all this great volcanic and tectonic activity to refine many things like uranium into usable ores. More than enough to pollute all the inner system planets, and perhaps most of the outer system ones also. Luckily for us most off the uranium is locked up in pitch-blend and other ores that won't leach it out easily.
P8 - When the enevitable mistake did occur, in a back and forth pissing match of this magnitude, the losed would of course blame failure on the other, claiming they had be sabotaged. And finally as for accelerating the space program through bigger rockets, it would be far more likely to decrease the wieght of warheads while increasing the yeild of them. This is far cheaper than building a bigger rocket to launch double warheads of the current yeild.
Finally credentials, since I labeled this IANAP, i'm a college junior in physics and computer science and I have worked for a year at AMES Labs previously. Plus I read a large swath through SF. Take my rebuttal for what you think it is worth.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
I never heard of the Russian project, which is hardly a big surprise considering the top secret Soviet culture, but if I remember right the USAEC version of this was called "Project Plowshare." There was a scheme to dig a second cross-isthmian canal in Nicaragua which would have required about sixty nuclear explosions. God DAMN technologists sure are stupid; give them the plans for a great big bomb and the first and last thing they "think" is "Woweee, where can we set this thing off!"
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Replace hadnouts with wealth distribution and you seem to have a nice place to live.
.oO0Oo.
My government was formed in 1066 and the raw materials of this land placed in the hands of six people. Many people have fought and are still fighting this occupation of our lands in whatever ways we can.
It is the poor who eternally hand out.
What a utopian fool I am for dreaming of something different.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
..or actually, human response to what is obviously a random mutation in the genome that occasionally causes death. we treat it like a plague, when in fact if we ever wipe out this "disease" evolution will cease. commence flaming
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
v.3.12
GCS d-(--) s+: a-- C+++$>++++$$ UL++$>++++$$ P+>++++$ L++>++++$ E--- W++$>++
I believe that you will find that the atoll in question is a made of a young corel base rock. This is basically a porous rock that is prone to seeping. I believe the main factor in this decision was that it was the furtherist French controlled land from Europe.
Surely a land based test in geographically old and stable rock would have been the best answer. For example how about in a granite rich region in the center of France? That would prove to me that the French government truly belives that these tests are safe and that there will be no leakage. If this is not an acceptable answer then why hold the tests?
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Oh well. If you read it on the Internet it must be true, right?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, USA did not invade Canada or Mex,... oops, well not since 1846, anyway ;-)
However USA had (has) a number of puppet states in latin america. Only in Cuba and Granada did it go as far as invasion (and only in Granada did it succeed), but CIA has been more than willing to help a pro-US dictator against a less pro-US anyone.
I agree that SSSR enforced it's buffert zone in a much more brutal way. Sadly that does not mean that the US has a clean conscience. You can't become (and stay) a superpower just by being nice.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I guess you didn't figure it out yet, but the entire Cold War was one big pissing match. It was about both powers trying to assert their dominance over the other. Both had systems that the other didn't like, and both were trying to keep other countries on their side. Make no mistake, the communists were not the only ones looking to establish "satelite" nations.
The U.S. didn't like the communists because they threatened their economic and therefore political control over other countries. It had nothing to do with totalitarianism. It had to do with the fact that once a country became communist, the U.S. could not longer control that country. The big U.S.-based corporations were forced out of that country, their land nationalized, and all their investments forced out. The U.S. established political control over these countries by establishing favourable fascist dictatorships which allowed U.S. companies free reign. Usually this was (and probably still is) done through paramilitary and covert CIA operations. Once a country was taken over by the communists, the U.S. lost that control. So you can see why communism had to be stopped at all costs. It threatened U.S. control over most of the world.
On the Soviet side, they had grandiose plans to "spread" their misguided idealogy all over the world. They didn't care how it was done -- in fact, that was the whole point to Stalinism: communism through any means. Certainly not what Marx intended (and I'm not saying that pure Marxism would ever work either), but it is what Stalin and his successors tried nevertheless. The communists are to blame for the current economic crisis in Russia because they were trying to keep up with the U.S. in terms of arms production, even with a much smaller economy, essentially leaving the country bankrupt now with the sudden change to capitalism. The U.S.S.R. had to spread communism to gain power and control over other countries, exactly what the U.S. also wanted, but they did it through overt military operations instead, keeping their countries as totalitarian states, torturing and killing millions of their own people and devastating their economy.
In other words, the Cold War was a waste of time, a power struggle over control of the world. The U.S.S.R., with a much smaller economy and less control over the world, just could not win against the U.S. superpower. The Cold War has left us with a U.S. intelligence community completely out of control, huge power over the U.S. from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, huge defense contractor corporations, an economy based on war, chronically lying Presidents (of course, that was probably there before the Cold War too, but I'm guessing much worse now), undisposable nuclear weapons and nuclear waste that serves no purpose, and economic and political devastation in the former Soviet Union. All over a "pissing match". I must say, good job to both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. You have managed to fuck up the world a hell of a lot more.
You are ever so funny! I hope this gets a score 5 funny!
Yes it is a sad commentary. There really is no excuse for those "pissing matches" as they threated everyones' lives on this planet. Its also sad to me that there are people that would want to take the moon and turn it into an advertisement. I think the moon should be kept neutral, or to be used as a stepping stone to the other planets (perhaps an internatinally run base?). I hope that when we begin to leave this planet, that we leave some of the crap behind.
They used to blow mountains and dig whole lakes with nukes. I remember seeing a report on this a while ago. Great stuff, really nice lakes ... too bad they're so radioactive that everybody's dying of cancer in the surrounding villages ... LOL
If I remember correctly, the USSR concidered a moon a-bomb as a show of power but descided against it. Feble little flash on the side of the moon wouldn't be worth the trouble.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
if they blew up big nukes, well they could potentially (without much difficulty since themoon is quite a bit smaller than the earth) blow it up entirely.
Woah there, time for a reality check I think!
Yes, the moon is quite a bit smaller than the Earth. I forget how much smaller, but the gravitiatioanl force is roughly a sixth, so that'll give you some idea (gravitational force depends upon mass/(square of radius), don't forget, so it's not as easy as being a sixth the mass)
But blow it up entirely? We are still talking about billions upon billions of tons of rock; I personally doubt that we'd be able to blow up an average-sized asteroid if ever we needed to (a la "Armagedon")
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I guess this is really more of a reply to H's comments on the story, rather than the story itself, but is it really such a sad commentary? I mean, I'm much more comfortable with the idea that the government would detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon to scare the USSR than I am with them detonating them on earth. I guess I just make certain assumptions about the early cold war mindset that let me excuse "pissing matches," to a certain extent.
The fact of the matter is that if America had shown early on that they were clearly the superior superpower on Earth the Cold War might not have dragged on for as long as it did.
.oO0Oo.
Ah I see, you mean because the Russian people didn't have TV sets no-one noticed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Luckily the powerless individual poor fucking average Joe was turned into dust for the crimes of his oppressor.
I hope you never get your turn to see the blinding light
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yeah, damn the Teutons and that cheap TC rush technique they use..
:)
BilldaCat
stupid things the various governments of the world have planned and/or done.
you should check out `a higher form of killing` by jeremy paxman (yes, THAT pacman, if you`re in the u.k.) to see more `well-spent` tax dollars/pounds... amazing stuff (its about nerve/germ/biological warfare)...
After seeing Gladiator and its opening scene of the Romans fighting the Germans in brutal, hand-hand combat, if you hate someone that much you're willing to die on the field like that, blowing the moon up with nuclear weapons sounds positively pacifist.
It's amazing how far society has come in the last century... and yet how much everything has remained the same...
;)
If the same thing were planned today, there would be tons of protests... back then it would have probably been "Yay for us!"...
And you know, if they had nuked the moon, that would've been when they discovered afterward that it had amazing resources or a hidden ancient technology... at least that's what would've happened on the "Outer Limits"...
BlackNova Traders
Later on in Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" series, lord Tetsuo blows a big chunk out of the moon to demonstrate his power.
It basically f*cked up the tides worldwide. Scary.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I'm sure every large government has lots of plans worked out to do all sorts of ridiculous things. There is no guilt in conceiving of such a thing. Better they have the wit to think of it, and not do it, than to be too slow to conceive of it.
got this is my box a couple days ago...
During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of about $1 million U.S. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on Earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
--Ryan
The shoulda nuked the moon. We didn't really need the tides anyway. And without the moon, maybe I wouldn't have to put up with watching love lorn couples comment on how romantic it is.
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
What the world's nuclear powers should be doing is firing nukes at near earth objects. Make it into a competition of how many asteroids they can bag. Not only could we gain valuable data on how to deflect or destroy asteroids that might collide with earth, but we could also have NASA provide live video feeds on pay-per-view!
This is not at all surprising news. The U.S. nuked nearly every thing in sight back in the '50's when "military science" was an oxymoron. Recall the experiments on live animals, live soldiers, ships, houses, and anything else that could be vaporised by gamma rays. The Cold War put a lot of strange thoughts into the heads of both sides.
;-) Hey, at least we got Apollo out of all this.
Read "A New Ocean" by William Burrows. Apparently the Soviets had also planned to nuke the moon. Back then, Luna was considered by generals on both sides to be a vital weapons platform for raining nuclear terror upon the Earth from 300,000 km. The idea was that since the travel time for a missile from Earth to Moon is at least 2 days, it would be impossible to launch a strike on the moon without detection, and the moon-defense system would in turn rain death upon your country from above, and there would be little you could do to stop a 10 km/s warhead. This was before an early-warning system was in use, of course.
I don't see why there are 500 posts to this topic... this is just good old 1950's U.S. policy
I guess I should have said...the CIA was involved...but the CIA often does not represent the United States.
Had US Marines stepped foot on Cuba in '61...then the United States would have been involved
that we should accept the way we accept that we will all die -- not with joy, but with a
calm acceptance that we cannot purge this from ourselves; we have to live with it
I disagree. I think what you mean to say is that some human beings are brutal, and that all human beings could become brutal under the right circumstances. But I daresay 99.99% of the population is at least not actively violent at any given time... it's just the other
(sorry if I'm stating the obvious here)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of course!
That was called "Open Force Warfare"
"Better Battles Trough Peer Review"
It was generally percieved as a better alternative to "Closed Force"
Actually that is why the military (MilitSoft) was split up into separate branches (Army, Navy, etc) by the Justice Department.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
The comment that tipped me off that this was garbage, was when they mentioned that the best place to detonate would be the dark side of the moon. The Dark Side of the Moon is figuratively dark not photon-deprived dark. It is the side of the moon that always faces away from earth due to the nature of the moon's orbit and revolution. If you were trying to impress people on Earth why would you dentonate on the side that no one can see? In another point who honestly believes that Sagan thought that blowing up a nuke on the Moon would be a good way to find microbes??!?!? The man was a life long activist against nuclear arms and Man's self destruction.
-Shieldwolf($.02)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
I've also heard the theory that the Moon attracts projectiles that would otherwise hit the Earth. Therefore, our satellite may have prevented major catastrophes which could have retarded the development of life.
a prophet on the burning shore
I might point out that they didn't have that many sattelites in the 1950s....in fact I think they had a total of...what...zero or sometimes one?
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
Right.
In the 1840s.
We are not talking about Imperialism or Manifest-Destiny in the 19th century. We are talking about Soviet-era expansionism and Cold War upsmanship.
The US also occupied and ruled Haiti. The United States annexed Puetro Rico, Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Cuba was spun off in...1899 and the Phillipines in 1948.
Actually, from a dynamical systems viewpoint, the Earth-Moon system is probably better viewed as a compound planet revolving around the Sun that it is as a primary (the Earth) with a satellite body (the Moon). Unlike a true moon, Earth's moon's orbit is always concave towards the Sun. (Contrast this with the Galilean satellites of the plant Jupiter. Their orbits are always concave towards Jupiter, and frequently concave away from the Sun.)
Of course, that's a little like saying that the Sun doesn't rise in the morning. I don't know about you, but I certainly saw today's sunrise...
Wanting to "wash ones boots in the Indian Ocean" doesn't count, right? I wonder which revisionist historian got ahold of you.
Reminds me of a GI Joe cartoon I saw when I was younger where there was aplot to carve the face of Cobra Commander on the moon but QuickKick carved a smiley face instead...
Anyone else remember that one?
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
The United States succesfully invaded Cuba in 1898.
The United States didn't attempt to invade Cuba in the 1960s...Cuban Nationalists did with some support from the CIA...but Kennedy didn't give them US military support...so the invasion failed.
You are right on about the becoming a superpower by being a nice guy all of the time.
Another point to ponder is that the internet wouldn't be here without the cold war.
But if they did option 2 on July 4th, think of all the money that could be saved on fireworks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
--Ben
What's the suprise? Are we all so shocked that the US would do something like this? We've enslaved our own people, rounded-up thousands of Japanese-American citizens in camps, and trashed people's native homes with conventional and nuclear bombs before.
We may be one of the best countries out there to live in, but we are not perfect. Let's move to ensure that the government doesn't do this in the future.
Arthur C Clarke wrote short story on a similar theme... IIRC it involved an experiment in which a fine powder was ejected from a bottle on the moon's surface, and the dissipation of the powder was to be observed from Earth in order to learn something about the moon's sparse atmosphere. As the dust rose, spreading out but not really getting stirred up, it became obvious that someone had been paid a large sum of money to place a stencil of the "Coca Cola" logo on top of the bottle, so as the particles rose and spread out further and further they formed a very large, very widely visible advert for said beverage.
No idea if this was before Heinlein or not... Probably mid 50s at a guess.
-Andy
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
Yeah it really worked out just fine.
.oO0Oo.
We now live in a Utopian dreamworld here in Europe.
How sorry I am that nice Mr Churchill didn't burn more poor working class Germans alive every night.
I feel much safer in my bed knowing that the shining example of human decency could suddenly rain down on my head if some power hungry fanatic gets control of the land I live in.
I know, let's all get in a truck, drive off to Pakistan with a flamethrower and burn alive the poor women who are forced to stay at home under the threat of death from their "law enforcement" protectors.
Oh, sorry shhhh everything is fine, people are not persecuted any more because Hitler is dead and GI Joe is #1.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Eerie...like missing a belly-button.
Does it strike you strange that soon after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Soviet Union that people seemed to ho-hum those events? I'll never forget Tianimen Square in June of 1989. Especially this photo of the man standing in front of the tanks.
These were global events that shaped the future -- still impacting today. How soon we forget.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If you were really trying to prevent something you wouldn't have to use military force. And no I am not jealous at any american, I am glad I am NOT an american.
Rubbish - the US is at the vanguard of the United Nation's efforts at peacekeeping in places where civil strife have become war, and what thanks do we get for risking our soldier's lives? None, instead we get vilified by liberals and foreigners for being oppressive, like it was some kind of unilateral action. The US is magnanimous enough to use our might to try and help other nations that are in need, and for all the thanks we get for it we might as well not bother.
The US doesn't even pay its UN contribution. And the only thing the US want's to do is to dump a payload of bombs on this weeks bad guys and they might even consider to help a peace keeping force long after the conflict is over.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
There may have been incursions into Russia by various powers.
But does this excuse the events in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, respectively? How about Poland in 1981? Or Afghanistan? Does anyone remember the Berlin Wall?
True, the Germans may have invaded in 1941, but this was after STALIN butchered his own officer corps in a fit of murderous paranoia.
The Soviets have the dishonor of being the only regime in the history of the world to build border fortifications to KEEP THEIR OWN PEOPLE IN!! Say what you will about NATO expansionism, but NATO didn't/doesn't systematically demoralize its own people. In fact ALL of the countries in NATO during the cold war ended up being far better off than their counterparts in the Warsaw Pact.
With all the discussions ongoing about the ownership of postings here, and the accountablity Slashdot is owning up to for publishing people comments, one thing i have *not* heard people speaking of is the ever-present question of who/what/where/why the information that at the core begins these discussions comes from. It internet accuracy issue has been all but dropped as of late, and even still, we see more and more "hoaxes" and even more, we see hoaxes succeding brings sick numbers of hits into sites that don't care on the flip side the lesser press about the hoax brings in EVEN MORE HITS (which as we all know, is still seen as all important, even with the stock markets recent trends). I just think that the moderation trends for some discussions brings in more factual information (ie. stories based in fact) and other stories end up with highly moderated opinions (which aren't bad, except that i would just love to heard some sort of secondary confirmation through such posts). I guess thats the crux of it though, the core of the problem lies in the lack of backwords attention by the large audience in really railing the ones responsible for not checking their references. -slinted
I didn't mean to imply your commanding officer lied to you or even that his commanding officer or even someone several levels higher did.
But if I was among the top brass, (I'm thinking President, secretary of state and a few top generals here) what I would let out of there is what I wanted people to believe - and it would not be an impossible story but a very realistic one - I would NEVER reveal plans to invade the Soviet Union or annihilate some country or spray Agent Orange on another - if we did that we wouldn't be the good guys anymore. But that doesn't mean we don't think of it and plan it and execute it when the risks and costs are acceptable. And I don't mean to imply these people did these things because they were evil but probably truly believed they would be doing it for the greater good of humanity or at least of their country.
Mmmm.. Donuts
"Um, once someone has orbit superiority, they can blow up any of our air planes. Then they have air superiority and they can blow up any of our ground troops. Then they have ground superiority and they won. Why do you think the US works so hard to obtain air superiority in modern warfare? It is the KEY to ground superiority."
It's not.
The problem with air superiority is that it cannot translate into ground superiority for the very reason that you cannot monitor everything that's going on on the ground when you're a thousand feet up going 500 miles per hour.
Even in Desert Storm, we still had to land a million people over seas in order to establish ground superiority.
The best air superiority will buy you is an edge. That is, it will help you with recon, and it will help you harass the hell out of supply lines. But true ground superiority can only be achieved by putting grunts on the ground. And to win a ground war, you have to fight a ground war.
Well an important tool in that containment policy was (is) to destabilize countries around the globe if the "wrong" people rise to power.
About the quest for domination: Nobody can stay in power for a very long time without some popular support. The communist party had two major points to make in the propaganda.
1) Remember how bad things were under the tsar
2) We will make sure that the next war will *never* be fought on the rodina
The first point became harder and harder to press as time went by. The second was a real killer. You can take a whole lot of oppression from your government, if you truly believe that foreign troops are a likely alternative. The cold war therefore suited the bolsjeviks like a glove. They had a mighty enemy against which thay could unite the people. (In the US, McCarthy played the same game)
BUT those arguments could never work on an international scale. Outside Russia, kremlin domination could only be achieved by power. Maintaining an empire, based only on military power is an impossible task in the long run. The Soviet leaders must have realized that.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Well,... who *do* they represent? If there had been a military coup here, supported by the GRU I would have blamed it on the SSSR, wether or not it had Leonid Brezjnev's personal approval.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Okay, getting waaay off topic here, but I figure no-ones gonna read this reply now except maybe brassrat77, so what the heck. :-)
I checked this out last night, and the whole moon-mission story is called "Venture To The Moon". It consists of six short stories, each only a few pages long. They are:
1. The Starting Line (brassrat77's "early-burn" story)
2. Robin Hood, F.R.S.
3. Green Fingers
4. All That Glitters
5. Watch This Space
6. A Question of Residence
Number 5, "Watch This Space" is the logo one. The experiment uses a "sodium bomb" which shoots a cloud of sodium atoms into the moon's atmosphere, and when they rise into sunlight (the experiment is conducted just after lunar sunset) they flouresce, glitter, etc.
And it *is* the Coke logo. Quote: "The O's and A's had given them a bit of trouble, but the C's and L's were perfect."
:-)
But enough pedantry - I really just wanted to tell you the name of the story. Re-read! Enjoy!
L8r,
Andy
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
I'll wager that as an antipodean you don't even know the history of your nation.
.oO0Oo.
Well study the transportations performed in the name of that Norman state and tell me how we (the human race) have benefited from it?
The UK's inner cities cleared out, hundreds of thousands dead on the journey, the Australian aboriginies decimated physically and mentally (a race that seems not to even have a proper name).
In fact don't bother, just go backl to sleep.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hmm... better than the parent, much better than the grandparent, but this post also has a few glaring errors. A few unexploded warheads burning up in the upper atmosphere is not going to have a noticable effect. As you note, the particles will remain in suspension for a long time, and spread far and wide. LD50 for plutonium is estimated at 10 mcg. (through lung cancer) Typical warhead contains on the order of 10 kg plutonium. Your lung capacity is much much smaller than 10e-9 of Earth's atmosphere.
Even if we ignore the ability of the atmosphere to hold the plutonium, and of the oceans etc to absorb it: Suppose all the plutonium were immediately absorbed by the living biomass of the Earth. One human is considerably less than 10e-9 of that biomass. This is obvious when you consider that there are over 10e9 humans, and that we eat living things.
Furthermore, when an atomic bomb is detonated, at least 1/3 of the plutonium will remain plutonium. This fraction is even larger for fusion bombs. So for one thing, if the warhead were to detonate in the upper atmosphere, it wouldn't help us that much. For another, there have been above ground tests in which plutonium was spread into the atmosphere. These may have affected some people's health, but there have been no obvious catastrophic effects (when not intentionally used on people).
And it is hard to imagine a device designed to explode close to the moon surviving reentry to the lower atmosphere of the earth and working well enough to explode. It is difficult and expensive to make even an electronic device to survive reentry from low orbit. Also, barring an early launch accident, it would have had tremendous kinetic energy, since it was made to go to the moon. You simply could not make such a thing by mistake.
It is of course true that plutonium is a bad business. It has killed many people and will kill many more. But to kill even a few tens of thousands of people with a few kg would take a very devious and clever plan. If you want to make a doomsday device, you will either need a lot more plutonium, or must use a different technique. (I suggest nuclear winter.)
Not to mention that fact that as soon as it got anywhere near enough to the sun it would probably burn up before it could be detonated anyway.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Second, here's a quote from the article:
it was 'certainly technically feasible' and that at the time an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile would have been capable of hitting a target on the moon with an accuracy of within two miles.
It took a Saturn V rocket to get men to the moon in 1969, I doubt that an ICBM in 1959 could even reach the moon much less have an accuracy of 2 miles. And if you're a weapons designer only interested getting ICBMs to the USSR, why overdesign one that could go all the way to the moon? Especially if you're trying to make them as cheap as possible so you can crank out as many as possible.
Anyway, just a couple of things that struck me as odd.
"There is no shot you can take that I cannot simply deny." - Ertai, wizard goalie
It's receding at something like 1/4 inch per year, I think. Not exactly something anyone will have to worry about any time soon.
And suppose we *did* have the ability to drag a moon from another planet and affix it in orbit... wouldn't it be much easier to simply repair the orbit of the one we already *have*?
Also true, under the 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk the western powers deprived Russia of a third of its farmland, half its industry, 60 million of its poulation. To further annoy the Russians, the US, Britain, France and Japan sent over 100,000 troops to assist the 'White Army' in the Russian Civil War 1918 - 1921.
Perhaps the Russians' long-standing 'paranoia' about external intervention has just a smidgin of basis in history?
TomV
I Had plans to nuke the moon once too, but you know how these things work - you get a bunch of people together, have a couple of beers, work out most of the mathematics and engineering, one guy says he has a cousin who can get us a couple of Saturn V's for free, another guy who can get us some good uranium, and yet another guy who says he can build the whole thing from plans he's found on the internet.
We spent a day or two putting some of the pieces together, had most of the warheads built, and then it turns out that the guy who was going to build the guidance system couldn't get his hands on a Playstation II, and we now I have a half dozen Saturn Vs just taking up space in my back yard.
I expect the same thing happened to the US Government.
Something could be more cost effectively done with a large mirror made of the same sort of stuff as a solar sail
Sam I am, I do not like green cheese and spam
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
As to a mushroom cloud, isn't that mostly fire? Doesn't fire need oxygen? Doesn't the moon not, you know, have that?
A dust cloud, sure. Interesting question, what happens when you blow up a nuke in outer space. How much of the reaction is dependant on local atmospherics (I have no clue, I'm no scientist)
Sounds like a bad Star Wars plot idea - "That's no moon... that use to be Alderaan."
. . . But a part of me thinks that this would have been really, really cool.
Does this
Ok, I've seen 'CHA' mentioned a couple of times here... google isn't helpful (Carribean Hotel Assoc and Certified Horsemanship Assoc don't seem relevant). Of what do you speak?
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
"And then of course: the people suggesting these things probably knew absolutely nothing about nuclear physics. These guys were most probably civil engineers or maybe just politicians."
Wasn't it Edward Teller who suggested making the harbor in Alaska with small fusion bombs? I mean, you can accuse those scientists of many things, but they understood.
I don't know enough about radioactive fallout to know whether or not it'd be possible to make a harbor without long-term contamination, but I understand that, megaton for megaton, H-Bombs are a lot less radioactive than fission nukes. If they detonated a series of small H-Bombs in a ring underwater, maybe they could wash away the radioactives. Otoh, maybe they'll send tsunamis over half of California - I don't know.
So many people are saying that detonating a nuclear weapon on the moon would have done no harm. How can you be so sure. I would think that the impact, on the moon, from a nuclear weapon would have pushed the moon out of it's orbit and the results of that could catastrophic. I can not say for sure, the same way that no one else can tell me, for sure, that nothing would have happened had a nuke been detonated on the surface of the moon. However, I do not want to find out. As far as the Cold War goes, it seems to me that (forgive me for using an over used term today) was just a giant, worldwide, pissing match between the US and the USSR. What we could have done was launch a nuke at the moon to show our force and push the moon out of orbit. Then have the USSR launch a nuke at the opposite side of the moon and push it back into orbit.
Yeah... thats why it was found to be contaminated. And they exploded nukes in the air aswell. I'm not sure how much coverage was going on in the US about the attol, But it was enough so stir up quite a few protest here in NZ. The French over there where also pissed off to see Greenpeace floating round, so they knew they where doing something bad.
Authough we might not have been directly affected our selves, There are other islands out there.
And if it had fucked up.. It would have seeped out in to the pacific.
"The problem with air superiority is that it cannot translate into ground superiority for the very reason that you cannot monitor everything that's going on on the ground when you're a thousand feet up going 500 miles per hour."
Yes, we can. We have orbital superiority right now. Our spy satellites and communications satellites allow us to watch the ground and know what's going on. Our AWACs and other air based tactical planes allow the same capability.
The point is that when a ground unit moves in against another ground unit, the ground unit with air support wins. Especially if the other ground units air support was totally vanquished earlier in the conflict.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
(Ahem.) Our corporation (of whose name you must remain ignorant for security reasons) had similar plans for impressing people with a hydrogen (fusion) bomb.
So we built a fusion reactor nearly a million miles across, and we triggered it. It has been exploding for well over a billion years, now.
Unfortunately, people did not recognized its nature, and took it successively for a god (which it definitely is not) and for a star (which it is).
I believe you people know it as the "sun".
--
The possibilities aren't endless.
Are we all Brits in this conversation, or is it just me?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
I've been deliberately feeding him you see, which is to say I've given him an opportunity to enlarge at length upon why the point of view he claims to be espousing is stupid, which in my opinion is what trolls do. He did, however, show me one really scary thing in the process - go to http://www.jbs.org/un/ to find out what.
Oh, and btw, I'm European too - British in fact. I thought you might have worked that out by now.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
I think this idea of nuking the moon is brilliant! That'd show those lunar bastards. Every night since I've looked up, I've seen the Man in the Moon giving me this bug-eyed nasty look. I think we should show that guy, and a nice nuking should do nicely. We should charge Bill Gates for the nukes and let him nuke the Microsoft logo onto the moon. I think that would impress people nicely.
The Russian's didn't really have a significant rocket gap. They never had a rocket that could carry a significant payload to the moon. In fact, as per the IAA rules, they really weren't even the first into space, as the rockets that carried every one from Yuri Gegarin to the first woman didn't carry the cosmonaught down to earth, but ejected them at @ 20,000 feet. Also, they ran huge risks that were never really leaked to the west. Like, a rocket running on Hydrogen Peroxide that blew up on the pad and killed 150 odd people, or sending astronaughts into space without pressure suits.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
The root cause here is nationalism and this has pretty much always been fuelled by fear of 'hostiles'. One potential benefit of the Internet here could be to make different cultures/peoples more aware of each other in real life and less susceptible to manipulation by politicians riding the racist ticket.
Reminds me of that episode of The Tick where Tick tried to detonate explosives on the moon to erase Chairface Chipendale's name he carved in with a lazer! You know that funny!
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Perhaps someone should have told them there's no air on the Moon (Flash Gordon notwithstanding).
Europe: Loosers. I like guys with brains. I'm going with Scandinavia.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Boy, I'm glad that guy wasn't in charge. The moon pulls on more than just the tides and the axis. It also keeps the inside earth's core churning and thermodynamically active. "Our little generator" What's so special about that? Well the core is also rotating independently of the earth. That why the Magnetic north is drifting westward 1 degree every 200 years. It keeps the magnetic field strong and healthy. That's pretty much why we have a stable atmosphere. The magnetic field keeps the earth atmosphere shielded from the blowing off into space from the relentless blast of solar winds. Some physicists believe that Mars used once have a strong magnetic field and a denser atmosphere. Since it cooled internally the magnetic filed died off and the atmosphere and water blew off into space. So they believe the constant tug on earth from the moon will keep the magnetic field strong for a longer period of time than without it. It is theorized that the earth would have prematurely cooled off a long time ago without it. Just in that this is true I'd like to keep it around a while if you don't mind.
The article states Although he believes the blast would have had little environmental impact on Earth, its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'.
:)
Aha! That was the real purpose! They found out what's up there and in a panic reaction tried to conceal it!
Of course soon enough they realized that its easier to spread rumours in the press and get directors to make silly movies - everybody will just think mars a boring old red planet
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Like Samson in the temple, these people are mad and blind, and would bring it all down on top of us
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to carry on this argument, as you clearly aren't going to shift from your paranoid nationalist stance any time soon, but are you really so scared about dealings with the outside world damaging your country's values? It tends to be the weak party, far more than the strong one that that happens too - view entire history of imperialism. You seem to be making out that the US is the victim of the current global political situation. The truth is the reverse - you, as a country, are thriving on it. Going back to the isolationism of the 1920s is not going to help matters, nor is stepping up independent military action.
I still find it hard that you seriously view the UN as a force for oppression. Have you ever looked at the terms of its charter? It needs a unanimous decision of the security council for it to do anything of any consequence, and if you failed to notice, your country is a permanent member and so is in no danger of an adverse decision. Plus I see no reason for your dislike of the UN's court system. Every law which they police is one which your country is a signatory to. Take a look at the facts, not just at the internet postings of people of a like-minded political viewpoint to yourself.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
People are stupid all over.
It doesn't really have much to do with different generations, different societal moralities, or anything else... people are just stupid.
The sooner that you accept that, the sooner that everything else starts making sense.
People are racist because they're stupid. People want to build up nukes because they're stupid. People think they won't get nuked because of mutually assured destruction because they're stupid.
The quicker the stupid people stop breeding and are sent to jail, the better. Let the drug addicts out and put in the stupid people. Less harm to society as a whole...
The US Public, as Brainwashed by TV it may be, would have quite possibly turned against its own government. The United States has used the Atom Bomb once on Hiroshima and most do not agree that It should have been used. If the US government were to detonate a bomb on the moon and it put harm in anyway to the celestial light that for so long has acted as a romanitc painting on the canvas we call the Night Sky, who ever would have been in power woulda been thrown out. I mean. If an entire Nation goes bonkers over a 6 year old Cuban Boy who is taken from his home by a Government acting against the public opinion. Can you image the outrage that would have taken place if the moon were to be Defaced? Its a really Sad DAY when I can Liken the United States Government to Chair Face Chippendale from the Lovable Tick Cartoon
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Here's a source from The Observer, a fairly reputable UK Sunday newspaper. It's not a good idea to discriminate on the basis of a domain name. Obviously if there's nothing else to go on, then you may be suspicious, but as a rule, that kind of discrimination just makes you sound like Eric Cartman ("It must be written by hippies, and hippies suck!).
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
"Pissing match" is an excellent description of what was going on. The space race had little to do with political ideaology, and was really a mater of national pride. The idea that nations would be willing to nuke places they knew little about just to show they could is what makes this a sad commentary.
"When your only tool is a hammer..."
It's the 1950s. The United States of America. WWII is over, and the U.S.A. is, relatively, unscathed.
RADAR scans the skies, new antibiotics are making diseases less threatening at the least and there's even a vaccine for polio actually works. Optimism all around. Aside from the Red Menace. And we have The Bomb. A solution to be used.. but no problem that it properly fits. Deterrence is understood, but that's tense, nerve wracking, and not as 'satisfying' as just blowing something up.
So the bomb was, and might still be, the hammer. And there aren't real nails for it.
Good thing that was somehow realized. Detonating a nuke on the moon shows power. Broadcasting live TV from the moon shows power too, but applied with some finesse.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
It takes the Moon 15,840 Earth years to travel 1 mile at 4" per year. Over 4 billion years it's travelled about 250,000 miles away from Earth. Mars and its satellites are ~78 million miles away on a good day (data from this site). See the scale here? It'll take the Moon another 4 billion years to travel another 250,000 miles. It's not going anywhere any time soon. =)
Even if it travelled a full mile per year, after 50 *million* years, it would still be closer than Mars...
Take a look at the Moon one night, or look at a picture of it. See those craters? We don't have enough explosive matter on this whole planet to make even one of the big ones that the Moon sports. Ya know, the ones you can see at night WITH NO OPTICAL AID NECESSARY even thought the Moon is 250000 MILES away. Now sit the fuck down and ask yourself a question: was the Moon knocked out of orbit when one of those big-ass craters formed in a collision with a supermassive asteroid?
NO IT WASN'T!!! So why the hell do you think one man-made nuclear bomb is gonna do what a rock the size of England couldn't do?
You are so fucking ignorant it's making my skin crawl. Geez..
Yes, we can. We have orbital superiority right now. Our spy satellites and communications satellites allow us to watch the ground and know what's going on. Our AWACs and other air based tactical planes allow the same capability.
And they do such a wonderful job finding all those camaflauged tanks in Iraq and drug farms in Columbia.
Sorry, but a determined enemey can screw with aerial recon by covering up stuff they don't want us to see, and making us see more things by using cardboard cutouts. It isn't rocket science to create 10,000 tank cutouts (for example) and place them in one location, while covering the real 10,000 tank invasion force with netting. And it has been done--if you follow Desert Storm, one of the problems we were having is in getting a relatively accurate picture of what the hell is going on in Iraq.
The point is that when a ground unit moves in against another ground unit, the ground unit with air support wins.
I said that in my original post--that air support gives you an edge. But you still have to put ground pounders on the ground if you want to establish ground superiority. You cannot win a ground war with airplanes alone--and that was always my point.
Average orbital velocity of the Moon = 1023 m/s
Kinetic energy of the Moon: 1/2*mv^2 = 3.84E28 J
Converted to megatons of TNT (4.187E15 J): 9.18E12 MT.
The entire US nuclear arsenal contains a bit over 2000 megatons of energy (1996, source) -- 4.6E9 times less. I couldn't find the entire world arsenal, but it can't be more than 10000 MT. In addition, if the weapon(s) were detonated on the surface, most of the energy would be wasted, because there would be very little mass for the weapons to hurl off the surface. (Conservation of momentum - to push the Moon in some direction you must push something else in the opposite direction.)
In conclusion: Even if we detonated all the nukes of the world up there, the Moon's orbit wouldn't change noticeably.
I'd rather you didn't. I'm no Microsoftie, but I do live within the minimum safe distance ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
No matter what justifications you or the government can pull out, the fact of the matter is that the people deserve better than having their "leaders" plotting on how to control them in case of some ridiculous possibility.
Remember, the same martial law that is supposedly meant to be used in case of a flood or y2k, can be used when people start to wake up to all the crap that our government is doing for the sake of corporate powers.
Ever question why small towns across america are getting military-grade vehicles and equipment? Does the government have the right to use our money to devise stronger and stronger ways to control us?
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
Thats a god point. Setting off a Nuke on the moon would have been a total PR disaster! Once it had gone off, the soviet ruling classes would have claimed that it was a demonstration of the miliatary might of the USSR!
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Weren't the pictures of H-bombs destroying small islands enough?
Believe it or not, we've exploded nuclear weapons right here on Earth, and contrary to popular belief, we're not spinning off toward Andromeda as the result of wild and crazy alterations to our orbit.
The Moon is in fact larger than it appears in the sky. See the craters in it, the ones *visible to the naked eye from 250,000 miles away*? We don't have anything that can make those. And thank whatever god/s you may or may not believe in for that.
It takes a bit more than human-made bombs to alter planetary trajectories.
"Sir, are you saying that you want to blow up the moon?"
"Would you miss it? Would you?"
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Now that we've moved from H==Hemos to H==Hitler, this thread is officially dead. Off the record, though, what did the Cold War have to do with Hitler? WWII allowed the superpowers to emerge by destroying Britain, Germany, and Japan. Short of that, I see no relation.
No way.
The moon may be small, but it's not THAT small.. it's still REALLY GODDAMN MASSIVE.
People are stupid all over.
:)
It doesn't really have much to do with different generations, different societal moralities, or anything else... people are just stupid.
While the show has been sucking a fair ammount of ass in the last handful of seasons, last night's episode of the X-Files featured a genie who, when justifying to Mulder why bad things always happen when people make wishes, said that "nothing has changed in over 500 years" and that "human greed" prevailed and yadda yadda yadda (ok, so I don't remember her lines in their entirety, I was really high). Made lots of sense.
The sooner that you accept that, the sooner that everything else starts making sense.
I've been accepting for years
[snipped segment I have no cute response for]
The quicker the stupid people stop breeding and are sent to jail, the better. Let the drug addicts out and put in the stupid people. Less harm to society as a whole...
Stupid people will never stop breeding, unfortunately. The most that can be done is modify laws requiring idiotic notices on products (such as "keep clear of moving blade" (no shit?)) so that the stupid people will die, or at least get hurt really, really bad.
Let those drug addicts out! There is no need to continue the prison facility overcrowding trend by locking up crackheads, smack fiends, tweekers, the dope sick, and most of all, stoners.
You know what's wierd? If you have a sib just a few years older than you are, he or she won't have a smallpox scar like yours, either. We got injections, just like in Jenner's time.
I know that the newer style of innoculation was cheaper, more effective, and less painful, but it still looks barbaric to me.
To this day, I have really mixed feelings about the Cold War. It's easy to forget just how dangerous and aggressive the Stalinist Soviet Union was, and how awful a place it was. But when you balance that against the "police action" in Korea and the wars in Viet Nam and the Congo, not to mention the other stupid things that we did while fighting it, it just seems like such a waste, now that sanity has prevailed.
But history isn't a controlled experiment. Would there have been a Velvet Revolution without a Prague Spring? Frankly, I doubt it, but I don't know.
First of all, looking back on it nuking the moon seems really dumb.
However, "pissing match" is exactly what it was--and what it was intended to be. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that von Neumann was behind this idea (or at least supported it).
Military strategy since the mid-to-late 1940's has been less about "how many guns do we have" and more about "what moves can we make to force the opponents hand into playing to our strengths". In other words, game theory.
And game theory has a lot to say about bluffing's direct effects (like nuking the moon making the enemy think you are more powerful) or indirect effects (nuking the moon makes the [1950's] citizens more confident which in turn makes the enemy citizens less confidant, providing a nice vicious cycle).
In any case, there were probably some scientific benefits to doing this as well. Selenological research, ballistic stuff, maybe some astronomy, etc.
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In The Peacemaker they disarmed the device by levering off one of the explosive panels around the core with a pocket knife. Still went off and they got a heavy radiation dose but NY was left intact.
Generally underappreciated movie IMHO.
Tom
Yes there's certainly no poverty or injustice in Britain any more.
.oO0Oo.
Everyone is much better off.
The country side is wonderful and everyone is happy.
Even the Argentinians and Welsh enjoyed being burned alive in the Falklands.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Option 1:
Option 2: Nuke the moon!!!
Such an easy decision.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Locks schmocks. Just blast a natural channel through there. And now that Panama has hired China to administrate the canal (who are now hiking fees to extortion levels), nuking it might again be an option to consider. And it's all stupid ass Carter's fault for giving the canal away. The moment that happened you knew it'd fall under the control of penny-ante dictators. Sure enough.
George Carlin:
War is just a bunch of prick waving. Me are insecure about the size of their dicks and go to war to kill eachother over it.
Have you ever noticed that the rockets, the bombs, the bullets, the torpedos, are all shaped like dicks?
It's s subconscience need to project the penis into other peoples business. It's called fu**ing with people!
I'm sure you can find a mp3 of this on napster or Scour or something. =)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
The 2nd poster is correct, I recall reading it in a A.C.Clarke story. IIRC, the story has a multinational exploration team (US ship, British ship, Soviet ship). Lot's of humorous Cold-War era scenes. Like everyone executes their TLI burn one orbit early (they all wanted to be first!).
The 6+ gag (it wasn't Coke - Clark mentions to logo was too complicated) is executed by the American crew.
Now I just have to recall the name of the story.
I remember a couple of years ago reading an article about how Pepsi was researching a way to project an image of the Pizza Hut on the logo for one night. They were going to use lasers or something. The moon is a great advertising space, everyone can see it. Well, everyone near the projection equipment ;-)
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
World "conquest" was very much on Stalin's mind until late in the day however, like the Nazis and world capitalists the communists saw this as liberation not conquest.
.oO0Oo.
Opposition was ruthlessly and bloodily crushed.
Governments work for the benefit of governments not the governed.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Weren't some of those generals also Russian/Soviet?
Get off your high horse, yank - thanks for the help and all but the Brits and the Commonwealth (Canada, India, Aus etc)and the various undergrounds could still have won, it just would have taken a little longer (ok, a lot longer). Dieppe and Normandy aside, the Russians/Soviets did a lot more to defeat the Axis (manpower wise).
This whole "American Cavalry" riding in to save Europe at the last minute is BS. A lot of other countries did a lot of fighting long before anyone even heard of Pearl Harbour.
Haven't heard of the raid on Dieppe? Look it up sometime and see what 5000 Canadians did to win the war. Pay close attention to how the US reported it as a great American victory when there were only 150 US Army Rangers there (BTW, it wasn't a "victory" in any sense of the word). Look for references to the South Saskatchewan Rifles.
My Grandfather was at war fighting while yours was making big bucks off selling us the ammo.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Actually, the orbit of the Moon already IS a slow, outward spiral. The Moon is moving away from Earth at the rate of 4"/year, IIRC.
/. several weeks ago.
:)
This was explained in detail in a Discovery Channel show ("What If We Had No Moon?"). The main thrust of the show dealt with the Moon's creation, and this is how it came up on
Detonating a few nukes on the Moon's far-side might slow or stop this, but we'd miss the light-show. Anyway, we shouldn't be moving furniture aroud the Solar System just yet.
In millions and millions of years, the Moon will be much farther away, and the tides will certainly be affected. Hopefully by then we will have moved out of our parents spare bedroom, rather than blown each other to smithereens over some mine-shaft gap.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Didn't any of these people watch "The Day the Earth Stood Still" ??? ;)
What were they thinking!!! We wouldn't want all those creepy aliens who know all about us to destroy Earth for blowing up the moon..
-- Ace
Yes well I'm just thankful we're not wearing those dreadful bell-bottomed jumpsuits they had on that show.
Holy crap were those things ugly.
Right, so, after the US has been given a position of power within the UN and has refused to pay its dues and regularly flouted regulations, it wants to quit because the UN isn't working as well as it might? Who precisely is screwing the UN, and hence the other nations of the world, over? This is a simple repeat of how Britain and the US fouled matters up before WW2 by making a private pact with Japan which contravened previous agreements and gave the Japanese military ample room for expansion, which they used cheerfully for their invasion of China.
And as for the US doing the dirty work, well yes, they do do the dirty on a lot of people but they never seem to actually put their own soldiers in danger, holding every one of them as worth more than any number of local citizens and hence resorting to more indiscriminate measures.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
You seem to be buying into the myth that there is/was safety with having large numbers of armed nuclear missles at the ready. That would NOT have been a victory for any side. The Cold War would have plodded along. Much how it has today. Or grown increasingly. Unless you buy into their story of a 'kindler, gentler nation'- both of the USA, and Russia. ya right
Question Authority
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
"The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large" . . . "if the bomb exploded on the edge of the moon, the mushroom cloud would be illuminated by the sun"
You need two things in order to get a mushroom cloud: an atmosphere and gravity. Mushroom clouds are driven by convection. Hot gas is more bouyant than the surrounding atmosphere and it rises.
Hot gas near the lunar surface would simply expand outwards radially into the surrouding vacuum. Sorry guys, no mushroom cloud. :)
This book ought to be required reading for everyone who comes to Slashdot. "Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know about Cooling Electronics is Wrong" is funny as hell. It also explains thermodynamics in understandable language and dispells plenty of awful thermo superstitions.
I'd have no problem with that...plutonium puts out mostly alpha radiation. Pick it up with your hands --- the first layer of skin (which is dead anyway) will block it. I'd be reluctant to put all the pieces in one bucket, however. (Say, did anyone else just see a blue flash?)
I wonder how this nuke would be differenjt without gravity?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"...and haters of Christianity to establish the "New World Order" that plays into the hands of the Antichrist."
:>
...
That's very good. Now, let's put your jacket back on. Yes, the one with the extra long arms you love so much.
Pssst. By the way, I think you're on the wrong website. Try here.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
The early cold war years are often characterised by Hollywood as generals just itching to try out the new nuclear toy. With politicians often being the controlling factor preventing them.
Thats the scary bit, politicians acting as the only buffer.
In reality, it was the politicians who gambled so freely with the future of the human race. The word "brinksmanship" was not coined by a man in a uniform. Military people as a whole are the most pacifistic segment of society. Think about it: when the ballon goes up, they get shot. Knowing first hand the horrible consequences of war, the price that men pay for the thirty second sound bites politicians relish so much, they find war distasteful enough not to *ever* wish to face it. That they do is a testament to their courage and to their training.
Granted, early on the full consequences of nuclear weapons was not understood. People who were generals in the early 50's entered service before the airplane or the main battle tank were even factors; technology was advancing so rapidly that no one knew exactly what would come next. Every avenue had to be explored, regardless of whether it was potentially useless, because if Soviet tanks and nuclear artillery came rolling across the Fulda Gap, there may be only one way to stop them.
If you divorce the emotional stigmata that has become associated with nucs, a tactical nuclear weapon is just a big bomb. A device that can be used to disrupt or destroy an enemy. Of course the generals were interested in them; their troops lives as well as their nation's fate depended on having the best weapons, equipment, doctrines, and training. The Strangelovian personification you invoked is simply inaccurate.
Rev. Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
The cake is a pie
This really sound more like a bad James Bond or Austin Powers plot.
The Economics of Website Security
Well, this is exactly the response I hope to avoid, in myself mostly. Once you start believing in Kaa's rule there is no hope left, nowhere left to go. I like to believe people are reasonable, or at the very least act in their own self interest. Your view is bleak, cynical, and supported merely by facts. As that one guy said, "who are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?" Seriously, I think that making sweeping generalizations like this is dangerous. Some politican might take you seriously. And while I have no problem letting the drug addicts out of prison, I'd just as soon not replace them with some other group. Think of all the things that were really done to prevent stupid people from breeding, and tell me that its a good idea.
Regarding governemnt 'planning', this brings to mind the first year the America's cup was held off of San Diego. Somehow the city got the idea that there would be massive crowds, so they sealed off the parking lots on the coast and populated them with port-a-potties and guards. If you wanted to see the races, you were supposed to stand across the street, and the guards were instructed to keep people away from the areas next to the ocean. Well, no one showed up, and I mean *no* one. Nevertheless, the guards kept the normal visitors who just wanted to visit the coastal areas from using the parking lots or even the street next to them. An acquaintance of mine rode his bicycle to the area as he usually did, and paused for a moment on the street to look out at the ocean. The port-a-pottie guards told him he had to move on. The point being, government doesn't always plan well, and even when it becomes obvious that a situation isn't turning out as expected, will continue blindly on. How many other harebrained ideas are still on autopilot out there, their purposes and goals long forgotten? That's the big question.
Ever heard of the Resistance? They did quite well in France and especially in Italy (where they caught and hung Mussilini before any "regualar" army got there).
You'd be surprised what some "ordinary" European citizens did without some "general" telling them what to do.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
One common misconception I see being repeated in this thread is that a nuke can go off without explictly being triggered
WRONG
A nuke requires a precise detonation sequence of the shaped charges to bring the core into a supercritical gemometry withing the few milliseconds you have before it vaporizes itself. Miss the mark, and you "just" have plutonium chunks scattered around.
This is what cracks me up about so many movies and TV shows: they have the guys trying to disarm the nuke that's about to go off; in reality they'd just slap a shaped charge on the side of the device,throw a Kevlar blanket over the device, and PAFF! scratch one nuke. Cleanup, isle 6.
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I remember that (unfortunately).
More recently, on The Tick, that Chair guy tried to carve his name (I think) into the moon but Tick ended up carving something else instead. I wish I could remember what it was 'cause it was pretty funny.
-- Gunther T Dull is not responsible for his opinions.
I'm no expert in fluid mechanics, but my intuition tells me that the mushroom cloud in a nuclear explosion (or any explosion for that matter) is caused by the interaction of the material picked up by the bomb and the atmosphere in which the explosion takes place. In which case I dont see how the Air Force could get their mushroom cloud visible from earth!
:)
I suspect a bomb exploded on or below the surface would produce a plume rather than a dome, something like the volcanoes on Io.
Also, remember one or two scientists on the first A-bomb project were worried that the explosion would ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere? Good reason to test on the moon
Baz
A lot of the pieces would land on earth. It would probably kill all humans. ... Actually, that does sound rather peaceful...
...they should be _chroming_ the moon.
Morons.
S.
In Thundar the Barbarian, the moon cracks in two and destroys civilization as we know it.. That was because of a comet passing between the Earth and the moon, but close enough. :)
The fact of the matter is that if America had shown early on that they were clearly the superior superpower on Earth the Cold War might not have dragged on for as long as it did. This plan, crazy though it might seem to liberal /.ers who never lived through that era, would probably have shown the Reds that they could not hope to win against the might of the American military.
Instead the US military strategists had their glorious vision scrapped, probably by the elected officials of the White House, more scared of public opinion than the very real Red threat, and the Cold War was forced to drag on for another thirty years, and now nations mock us in public rather than fearing the might of our military.
What our nation needs is less pandering to the "public" and more strength in Government. Unless the rulers of our country are free to take whatever means are necessary to secure our freedoms in a world increasingly hostile to American decency, we will go the way of the British Empire, and our glorious hegemony over the world will fail.
At the moment, America stands as a beacon of decency and quality to the world, an ideal of what a just and free society is, and there are many who wish us to be destroyed in fire. And the fear of "public opinion" as portrayed by the pseudo-scientific discipline of statistics (today's version of numerology) is preventing our Government from doing what is truly necessary for our future.
Cheap? The cost of transporting it back to earth would make it far more expensive then producing here in the first place.
The *current* inventory of nukes? Probably not. Every nuke that was on the planet when we were at the height of MAD and the Cold War? Well, if you detonated them all at once, I don't know. But if you did it correctly, you'd have more than enough to turn the moon into a very nice meteor shower.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I would not be opposed to seeing that sort of fireworks, but just think of all of the poor people that would be looking the other way, or those who would have their skies clouded over. man. heh. Such an explosion may even send bits of rock flying about space, and into our atomosphere. There may be a nice meteor shower too :)
Now we just bombard planetary surfaces with junk.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Who cares? Even our largest nukes wouldn't make a crater to compare to the astroid hits that mark the moon. And radiation? so what? one warhead detonated in space is like a m80 in a bonfire, don't people realize that the hippies 'smiling sun' is the biggest dirtiest nuclear reactor for several lightyears?
Some people are just so incredibly ignorant about anything nuclear it's painful.
A nuke set off on the moon would have been a huge victory in the cold war, saying to the russians 'hey, we can hit the *MOON* with our missiles, you think you are safe?'
Just my 2cbils
Tyranny = Government choosing how much power to give the people.
Haven't you ever played SimCity? Beam it down as microwaves! ;)
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
--
--
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
Yeah, but if you think about it, a chrome moon would be pretty darn cool, 'yall. After all, rednecks do like shiny things!
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
Hmm, well the moon isn't a planet and I'm not sure how much lasting damage you could really do since there is no atmosphere. But, I agree -- blasting the moon to make a point seems to demonstrate a calous disregard for nature.
But then, remember the setting for this. We were in a situation where we were routinely detonating nuclear tests on our own planet. Think they were worried about messing up the moon?
Even Carl Sagan was more interested in possible science from this than potential damage:
"At the time scientists still believed there might be microbial life on the moon and Sagan had suggested a nuclear explosion might be used to detect organisms."
This is mentioned in this biography of Sagan. He was working for the RAND Corporation at the time. RAND (Research and Development) was a military think tank. This was a period when the only way to get research money was from the government/military, and besides it was your patriotic duty.
However, Sagan began to disagree with the military during the '60's with the whole Vietnam thing, and he stopped working for them. (Although I believe the book said he still had some ties to RAND...)
I think everyone should read the book, even if you're not a fan of Carl Sagan.
I've known about this since last summer... except the president didn't want to use the nukes on Russia. Rather, it would have been an attempt to thwart Dr. Evil from trying to destroy the Earth with a "big frickin' laser". Fortunately, Austin Powers was there to stop Dr. Evil before this happened.
Lucky us :)
sigh
He did not advocate blowing up the moon. Rather, he stated that we should, if possible, alter Earth's orbit or other features of the solar system if it would benefit life here on Earth. His example was that if blowing up the moon would place the Earth in a new orbit with a longer growing season, we should do it.
Heard the guy talk a couple of years ago. Very interesting. Sorry to hear he's passed on.
The thing you're forgetting is that all knowledge about effects of nuclear explosions on health and the environment were discovered by trial and error. In other words: experiments were carried out and effects were recorded and analyzed. And human test-subjects were used, too! Not always with the subjects knowing it. And no, I'm not just talking about the big, bad, ugly soviets. The US military were brilliant when it came to testing new weapons... (see their idea to use drugs as weapons)
.,@
Which is of course also the reason that these civil engineers could propose these kind of things: most (if not all) of the results were classified. So generally people only knew it was dangerous, but they had no idea how dangerous or long-lasting the effects were.
And then of course: the people suggesting these things probably knew absolutely nothing about nuclear physics. These guys were most probably civil engineers or maybe just politicians.
xchg
xchg
jmp emailMe
It is a sad state of affairs to detonate a weapon on a pristine planet just to prove a point. However I do think it is better then some other explosions that have taken place.
For example I prefer this to the French alternative of the South Pacific. They don't even have the excuse of the cold war anymore to hide behind anymore.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Maybe the military was thinking in a game-theoretic manner, but it is hard to see how their doing so was anything more than an excuse for agressive, intimidating behavior...
"agressive, intimidating behavior" and "game theory" are not opposites. They are indepenent variables. That is, you can be using game theory and/or you can be using agression.
After all, the situation seems very remote from a game as it would ideally be defined.
Then you don't know diddly about game theory.
How do they make an argument that by choosing "rocket" their payoff is on average higher except by relying on their own *opinions* on Soviet behavior?
1) These "opinions" would have been the most well-researched and -funded in all of history up to that date. Remember we're talking about Cold War military intelligence
2) All decisions are based on opinions. You won't get anywhere waiting for absolute certitude.
3) They DIDN'T make an argument that the payoff was higher. Do YOU remember a nuke hitting the moon in the late 50's?
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Besides, i rather like the moon just how it is.
I've found that you don't need hope to live, after all. :)
Yeah, you're right about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by people trying to cleanse the Earth. I don't know what to do about stupid people. They just scare me sometimes.
Intelligent people know how to manipulate the masses. Maybe these people should scare me more, but they don't. I still have hope for them. They might change. But you can't become smarter...
I wonder if one of the deterrants to this half-assed-shit-for-brains of an idea was the slight chance that the moon's orbit would deteriorate and cause massive problems for our planet (like it wiping out what we now consider the americas).
Of course, the other reason might have been that Carl Sagan looked at them and said Billions and Billions of brains are smarter than you .
On the Space channel, I'm not sure what time, but early in the morning.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
At the end of the cold war, with all these nukes lying around, my freinds and I figured a good way to re-use them would be to place a bunch on the moon, and set them off in such a way as to carve a huge smiley face on it.
Just the US's way of saying "hey! Have a Nice Night!"
Ah... and then there's the wackos on alt.chrome.the.moon... I haven't read that group in a while.
And F$#ked up this planet as well.
but those flaws aside, you really had me for a minute there. Thanks for playing.
nuff said.
No, no bad idea.
Did you never see Space: 1999
"Information wants to be paid"
Professor Alexander Abian. He passed away recently.
"VENUS must be RE-ORBITED to a NEAR EARTH-LIKE orbit to become a BORN-AGAIN EARTH!"
Abian believed TIME=MASS and that altering Earth's tilt would cure most diseases.
Compare with Archimedes Plutonium, former Dartmouth dishwasher, who insists that the universe is a Big Plutonium Atom.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I'm not sure why, because I know I've had friends who've had all sorts of fears of nukes, but I never really have. That being said, am I the only one who thinks this is hilarious? I'm not trying to play down anyone's fears if they had them, but this is like a gang banger showing you his gun. It's a sign of frustration.
Initially, all of the west thought that the Soviet Union would fall because they didn't have the benefits of free market competition and so their world would stop progressing or slow down to a snail's pace. The Soviets had something to prove and they got a few big wins, first man in space, first satallite, they kick our butts at ballet and hockey, etc.. In addition, they've approached the "war" thing from an attrition perspective and so they've built twice as much as we did of everything. So the US goes ape, decides to put a man on the moon, boycotts the olympics, builds higher flying spy planes, all sorts of stupid crap. (albeit stupid crap that has made the techno economy of today possible, invented the internet, and many more wonderful things) Nuking the moon, in my eyes, is a lack of confidence in one's system and a sign of fear which makes me wonder why you're taking the whole thing so seriously to begin with if you're not confident that you are right. At that point it's just a silly hatered of the "reds" with no good reason. (I think it's justifiable to have a hatred for the "reds" if they are being imperial and threatening your lifestyle and you know you're right, justifiable. maybe not "good" but justifiable.)
Maybe as late as the 60's there was still paranoia, but from the mid 1970's on, it had to be painfully clear to anyone who knew anything and was remotely involved with the intelligence community that the Soviet ways couldn't compete with ours. We were at the dawn of a digital age with microprocessor, digital networking, starting to put computers in homes, etc.. We were so close to knowing the outcome and yet someone still considered the idea of "showing them our gun." I think that is funny. The fact that they had Carl Sagan lined up tells me that this got a little bit beyond the "light bulb flashing over someone's head" stage. It paints a picture that the government was open to ideas and no matter how stupid it was they were willing to investigate it, it sort of makes it sound like working for the feds was a pretty exciting and exhilerating job and I find that to be even more funny.
Nuking the moon is a poor idea. To make much more than a single, bright flash, it would have to be "dirty", ie, a surface impact. The some of ejecta would head to earth as satellite killers.
Furthermore, even a big heavy 50 MT fission-fusion-fission warhead is only 2e14 Joules, about the same as a 2000 tonne meteor (35 ft diameter) moving at 15 km/s.
They had plans to nuke L.A. before it sprawled out of control...
I said it before, I'll say it again. Great climate, lousy city non-planning.
Well, I'm no particular fan of his, but:
a) a comprehensive program of constitutional reform
b) a healthy economy (and an independent central bank)
c) significant cash injections into the NHS (though not nearly enough yet).
Oh, and by "panty-waist" I presume you mean left-wing and gay. You really don't follow British politics much, do you?
Besides this moon nuking. Hmmm! Maybe the Area 51 stuff is real :O.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I mean no disrespect but what you or your friend in the former Soviet army believed, thought, were told to believe or think, or were told the top brass was thinking had little to do with what they were actually thinking. The only thing that got out, of course, was what they wanted you to believe.
The Soviets would have indulged in a Napoleanesque annexation of the whole of Europe just as much as the NATO would have of Russia if they believed it would have been as easy as a Napoleonesque annexation. What kept each side from doing it was the deterrence and the threat of resistance on each side. While it caused a lot of fear on each side and still worries me what would happen if any of it fell into the wrong hands or if the hands it is in got deranged for any reason, ultimately it is the massive arsenal of weaponry on either side that eventually saved the world.
This is all IMHO, of course.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Ok, so they were trying to try prove that communism was a scourge on the face of the planet and that the evil soviet empire would take over the world. Under communism everything would suck and then it would be too late for anything.
So, to try to keep the world from going over to communism, we destroy something that is pretty vital to the earth. It all boils to down to a one sentence: join us or die!
Mwahahaha.....
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Aide: Sir, are you seriously considering nuking the moon?
President: (pause) Would you miss it? Well?!!
(paraphrased, but if you've seen it, you will recall this scene) ;)
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
I'm not kidding with the following:
I was at Iowa State University in the past. There is a nutty math professor who wants to blow up the moon. He believed that the moon being absent would turn Earth into paradise. The name began with an A, I think. I don't really remember.
We all had lots of fun when his plan made the cover of the Weekly World News....
Monday.. Work.. Ick.. Later.
It's a good thing they didn't nuke the moon. They might have turned it into a wasteland where you would always need a protective suit to survive.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Yeah, nuking the moon would have been good for the world by making it safer for capitalist culture! I mean, look at the decadence that has ensued as a direct result of not nuking the moon. Elian's father wants to stay in Cuba. Micros~1 was declared a monopoly. In general, commie threats abound!! Remember the lines of people in the former Soviet Union waiting to buy bread!! That would never happen in a capitalist country, where we only line up for Pokemon!! I say let's finish the Cold War properly and nuke the moon today!!
1) Against - After trashing most of our own planet, we consider the ruining of another body in the solar system. Environmentalism gets a slightly bigger scope to it.
2) For - The Moon, not capable of sustaining life (as it is at the moment), could be used as a vast testing ground. We could do a variety of really nasty tests that we don't want to do on earth, so we don't kill everyone here.
Neither option is particularly nice really, but there will be those people that say it will be necessary to perform the act(s) in the name of 'progress'. I just find it sad statement on the human race that we need Nuclear Weaponry at all.
M.
> In the future you will see a trend of UN
> policies designed to weaken national boundaries
> and put more power in the hands of its own
> structures and laws, again in the name of
> global peace.
That's a very sweeping prediction. Most people don't pretend to know what the future holds, or even to have known before the event. And who is going to make policies to take power away from the nation state when that is what the UN consists of? Fundamentally, I think the UN is a way of levelling the playing field a little, so that imperialist policies on the part of big countries have a very slightly lower chance of being acted out and thus hurting weaker ones (kind of like prevention of monopolies). No, it doesn't work all that often, but the tendency has been to do more good than harm, so I say long may it continue. Anyway, I'm off out now and so won't have a chance to read and reply to your replies until at least tomorrow. See you around sometime.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
What if, the Americans did do this.
The Soviets would think, I'll go one up better, and detonate a nuke in the center of the sun, and turn day into night...
--
Ooh, I've got one.. Security cameras in the rocket's nose intercept the path of a secret Russian morph ray, and they all turn into plasma lasers and immediatately begin firing, instigating an instant fusion reaction in whatever matter they strike. The world is consumed in a fiery ball of orange flame, the explsion can be heard as far a Barsoom, (who promptly expels us from the Interplanetary League of Galactic Ubergotts.) The only remnants of earth are Moscow and Washington DC, which are doomed to chase each other forever throughout the galaxy, both encased in ultra-super-top-secret Venerian force fields.... Hrm... I guess the lesson is this: We should view the possible uses of any and every technology with the maximum possible pitch of fear and disdain. I just wish I could have explained it as emotionally as you did. -Jon
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
Me? I was born in '61. I remember
It is just amazing to me that kids born after 1975 have absolutely no understanding of what went before them. While I would not wish those things upon my own children, I also think it is just as important that they understand why we did the things we did. Only in that way can they understand what they have now, and why they need to work to protect it.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
But I think that was '94 or '96. On the plus side it did cause (one thousand years later) an age of sorcery and super-science ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
We wouldn't have had them sing that we put a man on the moon if we hadn't.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Sorry, the "Martial Law" sign story is just another urban legend. See http://www.snopes.com/spoons/legends/martial.htm for details.
-- Meet the Residents -- http://www.residents.com/
Somebody tell me, whatever happened to people's inherent need to question authority? Has social engineering become so powerful that we all feel that sitting back and accepting the actions of those in power, no matter how ridiculous, destructive or violent, is all we can do?
Somehow I hope that there is more to life than passivity and apathy.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
Good point, Mr.P. Fortunately the qid=.... part of the link above is just a generic non-logged-in account.
From now on, I promise to only post links to Amazon.com using Kurt the Pope's id number. That way he'll get lots of nifty new books.
"One problem with aliens invading us is that never has air superiority ever translated to ground superiority--which means they eventually have to land on the ground."
Um, once someone has orbit superiority, they can blow up any of our air planes. Then they have air superiority and they can blow up any of our ground troops. Then they have ground superiority and they won. Why do you think the US works so hard to obtain air superiority in modern warfare? It is the KEY to ground superiority.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
You're talking about post-WWI events and you mention
1. "The Kaiser rising to power" (this was pre-WWI) and
2. "Hitler"
I *HOPE* you're not implying that Hitler was the Kaiser? Surely you know better than that??
Wow! Get rid of Police departments. They're a way for the government to control us. Don't let them have bullet-proof vests and pepper spary, they are just "stronger ways to control us"!
the whole idea behind nuking the moon strikes me as such a sad commentary on the Cold War that I had to post. The thinking behind this was such a pissing match it astounds me -- but here it is.
Sad Commentary? -- surely. Astouding? -- maybe you had to have been there.
I'm feeling like a dinosaur that I can actually remember the Cold War (the end of it, at least, I was born in 1965). I didn't realize until years later how much the Cold War mentality had shaped my childhood. For example, in high school I wrote the government for plans on how to build a nuclear bomb shelter (and got them!). I don't know what disturb me more: that I asked for them or that they sent them to me!
In recent years I've worked with people a decade or so younger than myself and have found that they lack that visceral, subconcious understanding of what it was like. It's the same odd feeling I still get when I hang out at the pool with my younger friends. They (born after the early 70's) don't have small-pox vaccination scars. It took me a while -- staring blankly at their left shoulders -- until I figured out what was missing.
In fact, what you're referring to was the studies of using demolition nuclear devices to blow away mountains to build the Interstate 40 freeway where US 66 ran through (this is east of Barstow, CA).
Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and it was decided to build the freeway just north of these mountains. I think complaints from the Santa Fe railroad convinced the Dept. of Transportation to drop the idea, too.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
This may be considered 'off topic' - I consider it 'meta-topic', and all this may just be an emergent phenomenon of the 'info age' but I'm seeing a lot of people going public and expressing disbelief in many of the 'plans' exposed by govts., whereas it may just be perfectly 'normal' contigency planning. Folks: govt's almost always 'plan' for every imaginable situation possible, and thankfully few of them ever come to pass. E.g., a local city bought a truckload of "this city is under martial law" in preparation for Y2K, is just one example. Naturally they try to keep it under wraps for public relations purposes, so as not to spook the public to riot. It doesn't mean we should run around screaming "the govt threatened to impose martial law!". I'm sure there's even a 'plan' for alien invasion, and you may not like what it entails, but it's probably there, waiting to be exposed so everyone can be shocked at what they were planning to do. Imagine if a city near a river felt exposed to flooding so the city wisely makes plans to deal with it in private, because if word got out a segment of the population would start panicking about a 'coming flood that they're not telling us about', when it may or may not.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The Munroe Doctrine: 1. Other nations ARE NOT ALLOWED to interfere in the affairs of any nation in the Western hemisphere. 2. But WE CAN. 3. HA HA HA.
--
--
The gravitational constant of protein has been changed[...] Also, rabbit carcasses no longer weigh as much a
This is basically the same thing, except instead of a pretty girl, it's other countries the US is trying to impress.
USA: Hey Europe, check it out, I can build an atomic bomb! Wanna go to the malt shop?
USSR: Big deal. I can put a man in space! So Europe, how 'bout we catch a movie later on Friday.
USA: Ignore that loser, Europe. That's nothing. I bet I can blow up the moon! By the way, did you have any plans for prom?
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
sounds like yet another urban legend to me..
God... is anyone seeing the consequences of what could happen if they blew up the moon? If they blew up small nukes on the moon, I'm not so sure that people without telescopes would see it and go "wow, I better not mess with the big, strong US of A!!" if they blew up big nukes, well they could potentially (without much difficulty since the moon is quite a bit smaller than the earth) blow it up entirely. The oceans wouldn't be held back any longer by the lunar pull (tides), and IANAA (I'm not an astronomer) but IIRC, the moon helps keep the earth in orbit around the Sun, and has other important benefits to life on earth.
*shakes head*
I can't even believe that they were considering that, it simply disgusts me that our government would do that.
Are you kidding?
Being a product of American Public Schools, my familiarity with non-Occidental history is.. spotty, at best. However, some examples I am aware of include:
I hardly mean to exonerate the West in any way by this -- I just wish to point out that It Ain't Racial -- It's Special (i.e. species-wide).
Human beings, by and large, are savage and brutal and cruel. It's what we are. It's a fact that we should accept the way we accept that we will all die -- not with joy, but with a calm acceptance that we cannot purge this from ourselves; we have to live with it, a rational determination to ameliorate the consequences as much as possible, and a certain appreciation for the fact that we have a choice in the matter.
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
nuff said
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.
Yes, the nuke race was the most visible sign of the arms race, but the actual war was fought in the third world, places like Korea, Vietnam, Afganistan. This was a war of government grabs. The two countries did not directly fight, but rather "supported" the actual warring factions with arms and money. We knew exactly how much the USSR had and the so called "missle gap" was non existent. Nixon knew that as veep but Kennedy did not. That was why he was able to pound Nixon during the debates. Nixon could not divulge what he knew without tiping off the other side that we knew their abilites and endangering our agents in the field. So the whole arms race was kind of stuck in an endless loop. Next i while i keeps on increasing. The history of the Cold War is really a scary but interesting read. Read up, it explains why France is 80% nuclear but the US is scared to death of the stuff.
It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth,' he said yesterday. 'The US was lagging behind in the space race.'
I highly doubt there would have been a mushroom cloud on the moon. If I remember correctly a mushrom cloud is formed because the slight decrease in air pressure going up makes it a lot easier for the shockwave to move in that direction. At a certain point this effect becomes less important and the cloud becomes more or less spherical, hence the mushroom. On the moon there is no atmosphere to speak of, so I would expect a more spherical cloud.
The whole "race to the moon" gimmick was largely that -- a PR scheme intended to show US superiority. Given that we haven't been back in almost thirty years, and we've largely abandonded manned missions to anywhere but our own atmosphere, the "Rah-rah" crowd got what they wanted and turned it over to the budget guys who whacked anything that cost over a set amount, regardless of what the results might be.
We may not see a manned mission to Mars unless there's some sort of compelling PR reason to do so.
I seem to recall that pirate ships used to work similarly, with the captain chosen by the crew.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Japaneese would probably like us better, had we nuked the moon and not them. :/ Seeing as how bad it destroyed Hiroshima, the moon would have been real neat.
How is it sad? Space is a perfect place to do such things. And the moon would make a nice target--not like the locals in the Sea of Tranquility would care. Space is no place for hard radiation. On Earth, we've got the atmosphere and birds and trees to absorb radiation. 'out there' there is nothing to aborb that stuff besides spacecraft and spacemen. I'm glad we didn't waste brainpower on blowing up chunks of the moon and successfully landed men on the moon (unlike the Russians who would make our natural bodily fluids impure) me.
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
They almost went ahead with using nukes to blow up a mountain or something out in the desert, for a civil engineering project. It was stopped because a town was only like 20 miles down wind from the site.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Nuclear explosions in a vacuum are boring, just a quick flash and they are over. Most of the impressive effects seen on Earth during nuclear tests are due to the fact that the atmosphere is opaque to soft x-rays. An exploding nuclear device can be looked at as a black-body radiator with its peak in the soft x-ray region. The fireball that we see on Earth is caused by the repeated absorption and emission of photons by molecules in the atmosphere in an expanding shell around the nuclear device. This converts the energy from soft x-rays into visible light and heat. The radiation also converts nitrogen in the atmosphere into an opaque nitrogen oxide "smog". The blast wave is produced by the heating and expansion of the atmosphere. The mushroom cloud is the result of the hot fireball of heated gases rising through the atmosphere like an air bubble in water. None of this would happen on the Moon.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The biggest cause of noise on Slashdot is emotional sensationalism. Of that I'm sure after reading the comments so far. We have very little contribution from readers as far as information on the subject.
About the only interesting news is that a scientist once talked about blowing up the moon. Another is using nuclear weapons to help in terrestrial landscaping.
However there are some holes in the article. Why would Segan want to destroy the very life he is looking for? Why when there were plenty of mathmaticians in the military and in military industry did they go to Carl Segan? What was Carl up to at the time? And mostly, why would a shot on the dark side of the moon mar the face of the man on the moon? Why would seeing a dust cloud make the Soviets wonder in awe at our power rather than say "That was some meteor."
Nope, stand back folks I am suspicious that there is nothing to see here. I see no evidence that the government actualy took this plan seriously even if it was proposed.
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^
I still find myself humming the theme music. And yeah, the Eagles were cool spaceships! I had a nifty toy one...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The early cold war years are often characterised by generals just itching to try out the new nuclear toy. With politicians often being the controlling factor preventing them.
Thats the scary bit, politicians acting as the only buffer.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
$Sarcasm = True;
Of course they wanted to blow up the moon. They wouldn't want anyone to find out how the faked the moon landing. What better way then to blow it up and destroy the evidence. Besides, during the Reagan administration, they were doing "Star Wars", which meant building a large Death Star. Sure, the article sites 1958 as the starting date and the man didn't "land" on the moon until 1969, but that's just what the man wants you to think. Besides, they got one of those little Roswell bastards, and they wanted to give the others the message that they better fly their ships correctly so we can have a good one to research. None of the busted up ones. Those don't do the NSA any good.
In 1958, and 1959 the US did not yet posses a reliable rocket capable of lifting such a heavy bomb to the moon. The US had a hard time getting a dinky satellite in orbit. The Atlas ICBM came online around 1960 and wasn't exactly the most reliable rocket at first. The chances of getting the moon with a nuke and having it explode on the first try were not good. It took the US many tries to get Ranger to the moon and have it return any useful information.
While the idea was probably floated somewhere at some level in the US Govt. (look at all the crazy ideas floated on Slashdot!), practical considerations alone would have sunk the project as it was being overtaken by real events like the actual space race itself.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
...not as sad as the big Nike swoosh that will be carved into the moon in 20 years ;)
Given that we sent the world a signal not once but twice in 1945, would it not have been redundant to do it again in the late 50's? Yes, it was a different show of force, but would we explode a nuke to give 'em the what-for everytime we were losing at something? The Soviets take more medals in the Olympics, so we blow up a track-and-field stadium?!
I think Ike missed an opportunity with this one. He could have eroded Americans' faith in government a full year or two before he actually did with the U2 incident.
-L
The Pentagon funds a lot of stupid research projects. This often happens at the end of a fiscal year when managers have to spend the rest of their allocated money or lose it. Sometimes, the resultant Really Stupid Project gets noticed and the manager gets to contemplate the peace and quiet of a remote Alaskan radar base. Sometimes, the Really Stupid Project is supposed to get noticed by the other guys. For instance, the Soviets stopped talking about Lunar military bases just about the time of this study. I'm sure it's a coincidence. During this period, my parents worked at the RAND Corporation, BTW. Something to do with Bombs.
People don't often mention this, but the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities was a bluff. Truman told the Japanese government that we had a limitless supply of bombs which we were prepared to drop on a weekly basis until Hirohito surrendered unconditionally. Truman was lying; in four years of maximum effort we had only come up with enough U235 for one gun bomb and enough Pu239 for three implosion bombs. After Nagasaki we had exactly one Pu239 core left, and then the cupboard would have been bare for several months.
I believe that if we hadn't bluffed those Japanese political leaders into surrendering before an invasion, then in the course of that mass infantry invasion of Japan the U.S.A. would have committed a slaughter against the Japanese civilian population that would have left us, before the eyes of history, down in the same abattoir of brutality with the Gestapo. Some time before the nuclear bombings, the U.S. Air Force had officially declared that "there are no civilians in Japan," that every square foot Japan was an appropriate target for massive aerial bombardment; and that on their side, all the adult women in Japan had been drafted into their Army.
Before the Allies could get their hands around Hitler's neck they had to hack their way through millions upon millions of German civilians whom that coward had interposed between himself and his foes. That's the true nature of twentieth century war: those big hero leaders, the ones with all the fine insipiring phrases, the ones depicted in martial poses in the statues at war memorials, cower behind hosts of slavedriven draftees, and behind them, hosts of civilians. While the working class get starved, shot, gassed and bombed, their glorious leaders enjoy port and cigars, glory and fame down in their safe bunkers. As this century began, we were fighting a world war about every generation or so, by which timetable we should now have fully recovered from WWIII and be in the opening stages of WWIV right now.
Old Doc Oppenheimer put an end to that shit but good! Thanks to his marvelous invention, not only was death in war democratized, but far better, the leaders who might start such a war suddenly became target #1. It took six years of combat to get to Adolf Hitler's bunker. An Adolf Hitler who dared to start a World War Three today would be radioactive dust twinkling in the stratosphere before the first day was through.
To the ruling class, people like you and me were, are, and always will be merely disposable things, and that's why they light-heartedly wasted seventy-five million of us in the first two World Wars. So proud and bold are they that they'll fight, for their honor, to the very last one of us. But when a shift of technique changed the rules so it was their own gilded asses first and foremost on the dying line, well, just look at the results! No more World Wars. No more ever.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
Which would you reccomend?
Had the US invaded, they would have to expect losses of well over a million men. They also expected that they'd have to kill off approximately one THIRD of the population of Japan to make them surrender.
Which is worse? Two nukes and a bluff, killing a hundred thousand people, or killing a MILLION american's, and a full third of the japenese?
Life sucks... Which would you reccomend?
Makes your head spin...
Dyolf Knip
Dyolf Knip
"Birds and trees to absorb radiation"?????!!!!
Since when is that a good thing? People have a tendency to absorb it too, you know!
In space, the radiation simply expands and expands until its no worse than background levels. Space is the perfect place for radiation, and there's way more there already for a few measly nukes to make a difference.
And so what if you blow up a chunck of the moon? Is blowing up many, many, MANY more chunks of Earth OK in comparison?
Dyolf Knip
Dyolf Knip
Don't forget fake wookies, lightsabres, and princess/amazons.
See.. Sorcery is good, and so is Super-Science..
Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts.
Ha ha, you're funny. :)
.oO0Oo.
thanks I try
Which is the sort of thing the US tries to prevent.
Maybe it's just me but that's not my perspective on US foreign (or domestic!) policy.
Was Vietnam part of a pro-human rights campaign?
Again my perspective is different (but I wasn't in the Oval office at the time).
If we had originally proved our military superiority with this scheme, we would have a much more stronger ability to prevent this kind of barbarism in third world countries like Iraq and Pakistan
I'm not sure the US state, or many other places for that matter (I'm not anti US I'm pro-people), really care about such things. I can't remember any Western political leader speaking up for the rights of women of to walk down the street without being shot by Talibans yet break a few windows in Seattle/London and it's off to chokey for 10 years as the President/Prime Minister condemns your actions on TV.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
He's an agent of the occupying forces who siezed control of our lands in 1066.
.oO0Oo.
His role is not to improve the lives of the people but to maintain his party in office.
That's why the turnout for elections is so low, people want to choose NOT to be governed by these people yeat they pretend they have a mandate to oppress us and send in their troops whenever the people oppose them.
Shoot to kill at a political protest, now that's civilisation.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Oh look, it's an Ineffective Insult...hey, can we have another, please; go on, something like "yeah, and you're all pinko leftie liberals" typed with as much force as you can muster. That's sure to have us all crying.
Oh yeah, it was shown in the U.S. at least to a certain extent -- I think it was called "Space 1999". I remember watching it as a kid some time in the late 70's. It was a very cool show, but for the time the effects were pretty lame (similar to the 60's Star Trek, but I didn't mind because I was watching those reruns then, too). The Eagles did stand out as looking very cool -- I based many of my Lego spaceships on them when I was a kid.
:-) )
Anyway, I had forgotten the premise. Makes you wonder how large a nuclear explosion it would take to affect moon orbit, let alone knock it out of orbit. I doubt that could ever happen (like in Space 1999), but I wonder if it could have affected it enough to have an effect on the Earth? Tidal waves anyone?
(but then again, maybe there's a reason I'm a Mathematician with no Moon data and not a Physicist
Given the cold war mindset of the late fifties, I have to wonder why *they* decided not to do it? I can think of plenty of reasons I wouldn't do it, but I wonder what theirs were?
Has anyone done any checking on this story? The news source on which it was posted, in all honesty, does not look like the most reliable place. Have we any guarantee this isn't a tabloid site à la National Enquirer? A few minutes of searching brought up nothing on the usual, reputable news sites.
Besides, I'm just a bit skeptical that the U.S. government would seriously consider nuking the moon. And none of this "they didn't know the effects" business -- by the fifties, the government knew full and well the short- and long-term effects of nuclear weapons.
Any thoughts?
kugano
That's a pretty "sad" place to nuke, given that people actually lived there and have since become dispossesed and radiation sick thanks to the good ol' US Government.
Cheers,
j.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
I don't know if anyone else mentioned it, but several months ago there was an AP story quoting officials who had been part of the USSR space program as saying that the USSR had made plans to nuke the moon. The gist there was that the military planners wanted an explosion on the moon that would be visible from the Earth, but after the scientists did all the calculations the military planners weren't impressed enough by the potential visible bang and decided not to pursue it.
The fat man bomb needed compression this precise, but that doesn't mean that every nuke does. There's more than one way to build a nuke (I've only studied the first two, but that's enough to spot the error in your claim), and the trick is not to make the bomb explode, but to keep it from exploding before you want it to.
Plutonium is fairly complex to fully ignite (damn stuff keeps blowing up partway before you can put it all together; you have to make the shift from safe to critical mass by fiddling with the chemical structure), but U235 bombs can be touchy. The little boy bomb could easily have been ignited by an external explosion from the wrong direction.
People talk about "compression" of fissionable material to cause a nuclear blast, but this is only an implementation detail. What really causes the blast is "critical mass", or enough stuff packed close enough together to get a positive feedback chain reaction as fission begets neutron begets fission. For example, just building a 64 kg sphere of U235 in vaccuum or open air would result in a nuclear detonation (if you could build it fast enough, without the parts melting down on you as you brought them near to each other). Lighter nukes are made by reflecting the neutrons that would escape back into the pit.
Scattering the fissionable material of a nuke would still be a pretty nasty mess. "In reality" I think the bomb squad would strongly prefer disarming a nuke without explosives.
Another thing that can happen is for nukes to melt down without actually detonating. This could have happened with little boy bomb, if it was damaged or defective and water got into it. This could easily destroy a rocket and spread nuclear waste over a large area.
Actually, a detonation after launch would be less dangerous than a meltdown or catastrophic rocket failure. The worst thing that could happen in such a moon shot is that all the fissionable material would survive, but be scattered over a wide area.
Go see the nuke faq.
Acting in my continuing role as Cold War historian...
Prior to the advent of reliable, high resolution spy satellites (which took a few years after the first satellite launch of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957), the only way the US had to check on what was actually being built in the central USSR was to physically fly over it and take photographs.
The U2 was a high altitude aircraft designed for that exact purpose. Until 1959, the USSR could detect the U2 overflights, but couldn't shoot them down. In 1959, they did exactly that, and U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was tried and convicted of being a US spy (as he was). He was eventually swapped out and died in a U.S. helicopter crash prior to 1985. He was actually criticized by some Americans for failing to take a suicide pill to avoid capture! I always thought that was the *real* beginning of the end for the Cold War - the fanaticism was ending.
Because Krushchev was head thug of a bunch of other thugs, he couldn't dismiss the U2 being shot down the way he had quietly ignored the U2 overflights, and the last Eisenhower-Krushchev summit of 1960 was cancelled as a result.
Eisenhower initially lied about the U2 flights, but Powers' USSR show trial exposed the cover story for the lie it was. Eisenhower justified the U2 overflights to avoid future "Pearl Harbour" style attacks, but to a generation of baby boomers to whom World War II might as well have been the Second Punic War, this was the first "big lie" in their memory to which the older generation admitted publically, and lead to that same generation's virtual deification of John F. Kennedy.
Eisenhower was wrong to lie, but disinformation was a recognized Soviet policy right to the end. And America continued to use similar disinformation thereafter ( the Pueblo, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to justify broadening the Viet Nam "police action", etc. ).
Not sure it's been shown much outside the UK
Basic premise is a nuclear waste dump on the far side of the moon explodes taking the moon out of Earth orbit and off into deep space - carrying with it 'Moonbase Alpha' and crew.
Excellent wobbly BBC sets and some of the best space ships (Eagles) ever in a sc-fi ever at all ever.
Did I say the space ships were cool?
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
In retrospect, some of the things both sides did during the Cold War seems rather cruel and selfish. Both sides put live animals into space with no intention of safe retrieval, for example. And, they also planned on nuking the moon.
Keep in mind that, for all intents and purposes, we were at war with the USSR, and rest assured that they'll do those awful things if we don't.
So ask yourself: if it ever came down to it, would you value the moon over your freedom?
--
Jake
Fortunately a surface explosion would direct most of its energy towards the Moon and wouldn't send much to Earth.
Thank you, Dr Eisenhower. Scenario Two:
Heh. Ten points to anyone that can cite both references. 'course, these were lasers, not nuclear weapons, but hey -- defacing the moon is defacing the moon, right? Who says we're any better than fictional arch-evil doers? ;)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
would blowing a nuke that big affect the earth? I'm no astronomer but wouldn't it affect the moon's mass (after explosion) and in the same way it's orbit? or earth gravity? isn't it all related?
Explosion. Big chunks of rock flying toward Earth. Big chunks of rock hit atmosphere and burn up into dust before getting anywhere near Earth.
Now wouldn't that have made a great headline!
U.S. Peforms Lunar Nuke Test!
Moon - Last night at 12:01 EST, the United States military added a new zit to the crater pocked face of the moon. When questioned about the unexpected strength of the explosion, they could only say "Behold the power of cheese!"
Military tests of weapons grade Cheeze Whiz are rumored to be in progress.
I build model citizens.
...rather than a nationalist fanatic. The government is representative of the public. Gung-ho displays of military might to frighten neighbours does not make a country well-liked, nor yet any kind of 'ideal'. Do you know just how many countries the US has bombed since WW2, and that not one country ended up as a freer and more democratic nation on account of the bombing? Thanks to poorly planned and executed acts of intervention, such as in Kosovo, the US has really screwed a lot of people over and spent mega-bucks doing so. Nobody looks to it as a beacon of anything but profitability these days, since it's hard to call people still dropping their load on Iraq after all these years 'decent'. (No, they're not alone - Britain are still there too - but without them the bombs would have stopped falling and sanctions would have been relaxed enough for better food, education and medical care by now).
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
I think people of different ages would respond differently to this news. Many of us here are post cold-war kids, or just caught the end of it. The space race is as distant as the mythology that missions were named for. To me, this seems like just more inscrutable posturing by old-testament god[s]. I am barely able to comprehend the hostility people my senior by only a few years have for Russians (Soviets...), and completely unable to fathom my grandparents reactions to Germans and Japanese. Oh, sure, on an intellectual level we get it. I've read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and coutless other histories, but that's not the same as feeling it. So try to avoid the obvious "this is incredibly stupid" and "look how dumb/incompetent/out of touch the govenment/military is" Thats certainly my gut reaction too. But maybe we just don't get it. They must have had some reason. It must have made some sort of sense. Right?
Look at the timing. 1958? Exactly the time when lots of UFO activities have been reported. It's clear now: the people 'out there' talked the President into not doing it to protect their moon base.
IIRC, under the terms of the treaty, you're still allowed to use nukes for 'peaceful purposes', Russia did a lot of those. So it still would have been 'legal' to blow up the mountain.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Why blow up the moon, when there are plenty of things here on Earth to blow up? We're Earthlings, let's blow up Earth things! We're Earthlings, let's blow up Earth things!
/. - coincidence? I think not...)
Mr. Show RULES! (and I happened to be watching this ep. from my miniscule collection when this popped up on
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
FC Closer
FYI, that "vile place" actually produces a lot more tax money than it takes up and supports upstate's declining industrial base. If you weren't associated with New York City, you'd just be another broke-ass New England state somewhere north of rural Pennsylvania and west of Vermont.
While studying at the local state University, one of my physics professors described a real world job he worked on that related to our current study of angular momentum.
We were looking at the effect of moments - for example, when the proverbial ice-skater extends her arms during her spin, she goes slowly, and when she tucks these into her side, she speeds up her spin.
Well, the professor was working in industry at the time and they were investigating a rocket payload that would launch with a spin to it, but once in orbit, large weights attached to cables would "fling" out, like the skater's arms, and slow the rotation.
And just why did they have to slow down the spin? He said it was because they were looking at the different effects on when the rocket re-entered the atmosphere and burned up. At the time - THEY WERE LOOKING AT LOADING IT WITH SPENT NUCLEAR REACTOR FUEL RODS!!! This was in the 60s when they were looking at the accumulation of nuclear waste and wondering how to dispose of it -- and burning it up in the atmosphere seemed like a good idea...
Of course, the best thing about Space:1999 was that everytime they would have an alert on that moonbase, all the women would take off their skirts.
JVOLLMER1@MN.RR.COM TEXT REFS DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD SELFTHINK VERGING CRIMETHINK STOP IGNORE FULLWISE END
I'll add something completely unrelated: ... and any engineer/scientist who has lost their boyish wonder at the fun of blowing things up, should retire and take up hall patrol or something. This contingency plan would have been a blast to work on :)
So can anyone explain exactly why he thought removing the moon would make things better? I went to the pages you pointed to but couldn't find an explanation I could understand.
Mmmm.. Donuts
A variation on this story that I heard (NPR, probably) was that Nike was going to put a giant "swoosh" in orbit to cast a shadow of its corporate logo on the moon. This was about the same time that Starship Troopers came out in theaters, so I couldn't help but think of Heinlein's old short story "The Man Who Sold the Moon". D. D. Harriman, the protagonist of the story, was trying to drum up financial support for a corporate moon shot. In one scene, he visited the head of the "Moka-Cola" beverage company with a button of the logo of their competitor "6+" superimposed on the moon. (I'm sure you've all seen the latest "Make 7-Up Yours" commercial, right?) Another scene was an attempt to scare up support from the U.S. government with another moon button, this one bearing a hammer and sickle.
--
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
In Space: 1999, the moon was hurled from orbit by a nuclear blast. Granted, the blast was from a runaway reaction of nuclear waste, not a "bomb" per se, but it's still a nuclear blast.
It's a little weird to see that people were seriously considering the idea of a big blast. Though the premise of the show was admittedly far-fetched, I would think anything big enough to be seen clearly from Earth would have a risk of affecting the Moon's orbit - not necessarily knocking it out. But the risk of changing the orbit enough to affect tides, weather, and such on Earth would not be insignificant, I'd expect.
Yet another reason to not screw with H-bombs. And here's a semi-scary thought. Space: 1999 was a series in the mid '70s, when lunar exploration was real, and the expectation was we'd be focusing on lunar exploration - a moonbase seemed like a somewhat reasonable stretch to assume we'd have by then (and the stapler guns they shot & the Eagle spacecraft were real cool). 1999 came and went, and all we have to show for it is a rickety old space station (Mir), another one being built behind schedule and over budget, and no realistic hope of going anywhere other than Earth orbit for the forseeable future. A pity.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I had a feeling someone would ask that question, so I've just been trawling my hard disk for this little piece of data. Basically, these are the countries which the US have bombed, and it didn't help their political situation once (though it often did a lot for the American politicians of the time, who got to look like big strong leaders for a change).
China 1946-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Guatemala 1967-69
Cambodia 1969-70
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1880s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-2000
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
After reading the post about this article and the article itself, I was thoroughly relieved to see that the few posts moderated up to a good level (4+) noted the rediculousness of this article. Come on - a guy who claims to have been involved claims that Sagan, who is conveniently dead, was involved in the project, and wouldn't ever think of telling anyone about it. Please. And the website that wrote it up? "Breaking news and views for the progressive community"? Just try and tell me these people are objective.
We haven't been back since.
Except, we have.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
We'll the US currentely uses cobalt which has the interesting effect of of becoming an emmiter can't remember whether Co-60 is a emmiter IANAPS (I am not a physics student), pretty longlived too.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Well virtually none Look at Seira-Leone, where there are thousands of UN peacekeepers, including Brits, Jordanians, Ukraininans, & many from other African states. Look at East-Timor where there are thousands of Aussies, Brits, New Zealanders, Jordanians, Thais, Portugese, Brazilians, but the only American troops there, are about 30 - actually a Marine feild kitchen to be exact. Look at Lebanon, Where there are Fijian, Italian, & others, but no Americans. Even in Kosovo, the Brits sent in a lot more troops, & quicker too than the Americans. Really Because of their experiance in Vietnam & Somalia, all the US does when it gets involved in UN peacekeeping now, is either bomb the shit out of the place &/or support. But when it comes to ground troops its no no no, as mummy might sue because little Johnny joined up as a career & not to be kill, Which one mum did when here son was sent to Kosovo. I really dont understand why all these yanks complain about the UN, because really its just an arm of the US State Dept.
Firstly, (at the risk of blowing my oown horn a little) soldiers are a lot more intelligent than your average Hollywood movie portrays. We're not mindless automotons who cheerfully believe whatever information we're fed. We are quite capable of drawing our own conclusions.
Secondly, high-level commanders are typically not interested in feeding bullshit to lower echelons. The military ethos places extreme value on honesty and trust. You may not always (for security reasons) be able to provide subordinates with the complete picture, but you never actually _lie_ to them.
Not only does lying reduce the trust subordinates have in a commander, but subordinates must be ready to assume the positions and responsibilities of a commander should the commander be killed. Purposely feeding subordinates bad information is a good way to lose battles.
But there was also precious little dialogue between the two sides, and when presented with a lack of information, we tend to see what we want to see. And we, as a military, were sold a Soviet Union that was slavering at the bit, looking for the opportunity to invade the Free World and enslave it.
But what we in the West neglected to see, partially because we weren't allowed to see it, was just how badly we were scaring the Soviets. The Soviet Union had been invaded twice in as many generations, and each time the losses on the Soviet side had been ENORMOUS. It wasn't until after the Wall fell that we really started to get a sense of scale as to how close the Soviets came to surrendering, how colossal their manpower losses were, and how miraculous their recovery.
After reading histories of WWII written after some of this information became available, there is no question in my mind that the Soviets won WWII. The Western contribution is miniscule in comparison. At best, we were a diversionary effort that distracted Hitler enough so that he couldn't bring his full effort to bear on the Eastern front, and one could argue that the Western factory bombing campaign helped slow the rate of German regeneration, but when it comes down to the number of German combat units destroyed, the Soviets win hands down - and at _terrible_ personal cost.
So no wonder they were just a teensy bit paranoid. And with the US spewing anti-communist propaganda at every opportunity, and a large, well organized mobile force parked on the East German border, and weapons of mass destruction churned out in the thousands... who wouldn't be scared?
And I distinctly remember in the mid-late eighties the Americans trying very hard to come up with ways to fight a limited, conventional war in Europe, without resorting to the use of nukes. From a Soviet perspective, that sounds a whole lot like an invader trying to get around their primary defensive deterrent.
The Soviet Union certainly wasn't the worker's paradise they claimed they were, and there were a lot of serious downsides to the way they ran their country, their foreign policy, and a number of other things. But having seen NATO's actions though Russian eyes... damn, we were doing a very good job of sounding a lot like an invader.
In a very real way, we were poking a bear with a stick, and I think that we're very, very lucky that the bear never lost patience and lashed out. And had the bear lashed out, it's hard to say that we didn't deserve it.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The Rape of Nanking.
. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud The mushroom is caused by the explosion interacting with the atmosphere. If you have no atmosphere, you won't get a mushroom. I haven't done the math, but I expect you'd get a dome shape. One that would rapidly dissipate as the dust fell again.
The bomb would have been at least as large as the one used on Hiroshima and its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the moon'. ??? The guy is a crank. I can believe that a flash could have been made bright enought to see from earth. Perhaps even tossed dust glowing in sun that's otherwise hidden from earth. But the energy involved in making the visible craters is many orders of magnitudes different than that available in the fifties, and another couple of magnitudes beyond Hiroshima. We see mostly maria in the face. Does anyone have the megaton ratings available for any visible craters (say orientalis?).
intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile would have been capable of hitting a target on the moon with an accuracy of within two miles. Intercontinental? ICBM doesn't even go into orbit. (I think "fractional orbit bombardment system" was an earlier name). You need more energy to get into low earth orbit. And MUCH more to lift it a quarter million miles straight up. An ICBM isn't even in the same ballpark as what's needed to get a warhead to the moon. Perhaps you could get the precision once you got the warhead there, but which booster can get your warhead that far? It's a long way. Straight up. If he's talking about ICBM technology as opposed to a special design (such as orbital assembly or gemini/apollo giant boosters), then he's a crank.
Sagan knows science. If there were an available quote FROM Sagan on this, it might lend credibility. But the glaring boners in this article make me suspicious.
Dr. Reiffel is listed as a physicist with a doctorate. I have only 3rd year physics as a partial minor. But what shows in the reporting is absurd.
It looks like we're close to agreeing on the principles, but we both approach the looney idea with different assumptions. Clearly, Reiffel's statements were either a little odd or badly transcribed -- see the reference to hitting the dark side of the Moon (which I'm convinced is supposed to mean a "New Moon"). Until we know the details of A119, we can just keep speculating on what Reiffel's comments mean and how the project might accomplish them.
Similarly, I think the politics are a big grey area too. Maybe the US and Soviets would have gotten caught up in a dangerous game of blowing bigger bombs on more distant targets. On the other hand, the Soviets didn't do this with a manned Moon landing -- when the US got there first, the Kremlin turned around and said, "We never meant to go there anyway!" A brilliant and cost effective way to get out of that competition. Possibly, Kruschev would have simply responded to a US lunar nuke by saying, "We would never detonate a nuclear device in such a prestine, peaceful environment!" Aborting the whole thing there and laying a nice, caviar omelette on Uncle Sam's face.
Frankly, I'm glad the demonstration never happened, even if I think the nutty idea was kind of charming in a "duck and cover" way.
As far as the size of the plutonium cores on the RTGs, I know that Cassini was the largest at 72 kilograms, but I don't think it was that big a leap over other satellites and probes. Mikio Kaku and others argued against Cassini for precisely this reason, that the space program was on a slippery slope and would keep putting more and more up until something went wrong. Kaku also overestimated the damage from a plutonium release and ignored the fact that Cassini's core was of a proven design that wouldn't pulverize and release powdered, inhalible plutonium. The Cassini protests left a bad taste in my mouth about nuclear protesters -- hence one of my wrong assumptions about you. I don't have firm figures about the size of other cores on hand, but if I find them, I'll post them for review and comment.
Niven, eh? Yep, I'm fond of he and Pournelle, too. I prefer the harder sf to most of the fantasy that gets sold as science fiction, with a preference for the high-tech space-oriented stories. The recent trend towards virtual reality and cyberpunk strike me as being a little too solopsistic and depressing most of the time.
I owe you an apology about the bad spelling, too. Frankly, there are some very bright people who have a poor command of just which letters are supposed to go where, and although such sloppiness sometimes indicates a sloppy mind, that isn't always the case. Pointing out the obvious errors was just an easy way to try to weight the debate to my side, and that's always a cheap shot and bad form! I hate it when I see other people do it; you'd think I'd have the sense to refrain from it myself.
Good luck on the studies!
that there is modern evidence that Japan was about to surrender anyway...and the U.S. knew this. There is a widely believed theory (one which i'm not too quick to discard) that the only reason we dropped fat man and little boy was because we wanted to show the russians that we already had the nukes...and we could use 'em.
The A-bomb, and it's modern counterparts (ergo Hydrogen and the like), are a blessing and a curse. The best quote i've ever heard about nukes was "There is no learning curve with nuclear weapons." - We've had alot more peace since world war two than we would have had otherwise. Possibly a third world war (although hitler/stalin/moussolini/hirohito all appearing at the same time in history is sort of a distastrous glitch).
The only problem is that, as i said, there's no learning curve for the weapons we have now. One day, someone's going to do something stupid with a big bomb, and over 6 billion people are going to die because of it. Humanity is farther from the edge than it was 50 years ago...but the fall just got a lot farther.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
This reminds me of an episode of G.I. Joe, the one where Cobra Commander had his face carved into the moon using this big ass laser. Only to be foiled when Quick Kick touches up his artwork with a smiley face so that he can mack some honey.
Imagine a starburst patter on the surface of the moon, as I understand it the surface is mostly dust. The shockwave from a nuclear blast would blow the dust out in all directions from ground zero. Imagine a pie pan full of flour (enriched or not) take a drinking straw and blow a short burst of air right above the center of the pan, you should get a similar effect.
Now THAT'S dick waving on a new scale. "Ha ha ha, we're so technologically advanced that we've permanently altered the lanscape of a 4 billion year old object. What did YOU do today?"
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Actually Japan tried to surrener 3 months ealier, on condition they could keep their emporer, however the US said no, even though they already secretly decided that the nips could keep their emporer. Trumen bomb Hiroshima & Nagasaki to demenstrate to Stalin his 'mojo' While Churchill got Bomber Command to flatten & turn Dresden to ashes to demenstrate his 'mojo' to Stalin. This was all because they were both pissoff at Stalin breking his agreement on letting the freePoles from London run the new Polish govt. All I just said is fact, & is confirmed by the secret war ministry papers that were opened up, after the 50 year rule expired
I never thought of that, but that's right.
Someone moderate this guy up, please?
So - what can you put beside a nuke that won't get radioactive? Graphite? Ceramic? Hydrogen? Would it be possible to put a radiation-containing shield around the nuke?
Don't confuse the word "passive" with the word "pacifist". They mean completely different things. You have to be somewhat insane to want to go to war; it is a lot easier to send someone else. The difference between "We should do something about Iraq" and "I should do something about Iraq".
Anyway, "a certain tendency towards aggression" pretty much sums up the whole of the human race. The difference exists in what particular form of aggression a man chooses. In my experience, it seems that the specific pathology required to initiate violence on a large scale is far more common in politicians than in military officers. The military just does what it is told, like any other machine.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
1958
----
US Air Force: We need something to show our power.
Response: Let's nuke the moon.
2000
----
US Air Force: We need something to show our power.
Response: We call it a "laser". This "laser" will be placed on the moon and will cost '1 million dollars'.
-Frijoles-
Man first went to the moon 30 years ago, and discovered that it was NOT made out of cheese.
We haven't been back since.
"Behold the power of cheese."
Munky_v2
"Warning: You are logged into reality as root..."
Jay
With the advances in shape charge technology, we could offset the cost of 'nukeing the moon by incorporating the proper chemicals (for color), along with properly prepared shaped charges. We could then sell Micky Ds on a huge yellow M shaped cloud arising from the western terminator, with an equally impressive red ball from Coca Cola on the Eastern terminator.
Moderators: Please do the usual, gimme a -5
#941
It would make no difference. The moon is constantly bombarded by radiation, and this would be only a tiny fraction of the force of some of the collisions that the moon has had.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
The action in Kosovo was not condoned by the UN, nor could it be under international law. It did horrific damage to the country while at the same time triggering a massive increase in Serb atrocities - they couldn't get at us, so they took it out on the Kosovans. It didn't help anybody or anything except the wilfully violent image of the USA and Milosevic's political strength (it gave him an excuse to crack down on his political opposition, almost all of whom were against NATO's actions anyway).
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
The museum you speak of is approx 40km North of Chernobyl in an old firehouse according the the Jan 97 Edition of American Survival Guide
Read my plan to save the Bengals
well if we can't beat the ussr in the space race or nukes (okay, we did) why don't we win _both_ at the same time....
--- Hey, Jesus is coming! Everyone look busy