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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
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.
I refer you to the Monroe Doctrine for a description of American policy regarding its sphere of influence.
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
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.
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!"
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)
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 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
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
..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
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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
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 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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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
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*?
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
"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?
No way.
The moon may be small, but it's not THAT small.. it's still REALLY GODDAMN MASSIVE.
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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Option 1:
Option 2: Nuke the moon!!!
Such an easy decision.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
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
"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
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
To all of the non-Americans out there.
I would like to personally apologize on this guy's behalf. Please please please understand that this, contrary to popular belief, is not the typical viewpoint shared by the average American. Most of us are absolutely nothing like this.
Once again, please don't let a few bad apples spoil your view on our country. Really, America is pretty damned nice if you learn to deal with the occasional nutball.
(just when we start to get halfway decent PR for something, someone has to go and make a damned Joseph McCarthy out of himself)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
--
--
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
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.
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?"-
---
So, although the sun produces radiations, it is natural. not man made.
---
So? What does 'man-made' versus 'natural' have to do with anything? I guarantee you that you won't die any differently if you stand on the surface of the sun as you would if you stood in a nuclear blast. Natural? Man-made? It's all trivial, you're dead either way.
---
Question Authority
---
Question the health food industry that has spent millions trying to convince people that natural is somehow inherantly safer/healthier than man-made.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
No, no bad idea.
Did you never see Space: 1999
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
The United States has used the Atom Bomb once on Hiroshima and most do not agree that It should have been used.
Most?
The reason why we nuked two towns in Japan (you forgot Nagasaki) is for two reasons: one, to demonstrate a new technology to the emerior of Japan to convince him to finally surrender. Two, while the number of lives lost in Heroshima and Nagasaki was astronomical, the projected loss of life from a Japanese invasion (which was our only other alternative) was projected to be between 5 and 10 times larger.
Actually, Einstein first proposed that instead of either invading or nuking Japan, we should instead invite observers from Japan to witness a nuclear warhead being ignited in the Navada desert. Nuking the moon is a safer alternative to nuking Navada--less environmentally destructive, and less threat of a bunch of small towns being exposed to fallout.
When put into perspective that way, it actually makes some degree of sense.
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.
Actually, we didn't invade Cuba to grab that boy. Or are you refering to taking him from his grandparents to reunite him with his father, in accord to court rulings which the grandparents where ignoring in violation of US law? Sometimes things aren't as cut and dry as the public relations people would have you think, you know.
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
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.
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.
I think they'd be more interested in viewing the flash and resulting dust cloud, not the mushroom cloud.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
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...
--
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
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); }
Earth's gravity just above the atmosphere (about 100 miles up) is about 95% of surface gravity. "Microgravity" is an effect of free fall: you aren't pressing against the floor because the floor is accellerating just as fast as you are.
The bottom line is that you need a delta vee of a few km/sec to drop something on the Godless Commies or the Yankee Imperialists from the other's territory, about 8 km/sec to put something in low earth orbit, or about 11 km/sec to reach the moon.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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?
Not anymore. Now they just fly overhead and kill polyethelene sheets masquerading as bridges, painted logs masquerading as cannons, carboard boxes masquerading as tanks...and hospitals, elementary schools, television studios, refugee columns, power stations and sewage treatment plants by remote control.
In a world where televised images predominate in the "minds" of "citizens," such acts constitute victory.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
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.
Would someone care to make an energy consumption estimate for this baby ... Probably something like the power of 2637 large nuclear plants ...
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?
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
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.
Fresh out of college is the best time to recruit people for secret activities. The military goes for high school graduates. Why? Becasue that's when they're the most impressionable.
At 21-24 it is far easier to convince someone of the evil of those "Red Commie Bastards", that it is when that person is 30. So the age of this guy isn't that big of a problem for me.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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."
Some villain on "The Tick" was trying to write his name on the moon, but was stopped after writing the first three letters. In every episode after that, whenever they showed the moon, it had "CHA" written on it.
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100% pure freak
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
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
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