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Does the Moon Have Military Value?
MarkWhittington writes "Despite the fact that under President Barack Obama's space policy, Americans will not be going back to the moon any time soon, discussions are occurring about what, if any, military value the Earth's nearest neighbor has. Opinions, as can be expected, vary on the subject."
That's no moon...
Are you reading this, The U.S. Government? The moon is of endless strategic military value! You could be the most powerful military on earth if you had the most advanced space programs.
Divert some of that ridiculously high military funding toward space programs, as much as you can spare!
Low Earth Orbit? Yes!
Military wants the high ground, and in terms of Earth-focused warfare the most you need is LEO. Lunar puts you 3 days out at Apollo speeds, and at the bottom of a gravity well (even if it is significantly weaker.) LEO puts you over any potential target every 90 minutes and less than a day away from resupply.
Until you've got strategically valuable positions in space between the Earth and Moon, the Moon itself will hold no value militarily.
Ever read Heinlein? Lots of good/bad ideas. Rocks are easier to throw downhill. So are nukes. Lots of nefarious uses you could put it to if you wanted.
Strategically, it's the equivalent of taking the castle on top of the hill...much easier to fight invaders coming up, and to reign death down upon anything lower than it.
But like that castle, it is in a precarious position in that supplies can be cut off...
if any of these 'superpowers' staking claims on the moon does some stupid test and blows it up e.g. drilling a deep hole and dropping in powerful explosives and... what will the effect be for gravitational pull, tides, seasons, the spinning of a twirling little ball? I know it sounds stupid, but is this not a realistic military threat to all mankind? *puts*on*tinfoil*hat*
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
This one? No.
Even Darth Vader had to build an own death-one.
But I guess, he wasn't the shiniest helmet in the Empire.
Any kind of launch system that is on the moon will require less energy to use due to the diminished effect of gravity and lack of atmosphere. While getting any such system to the moon obviously has it's difficulties, lobbing rocks/missiles/whatevers from the moon is going to be way easier than doing the same from the Earth. Furthermore, there is simply more room than any station one could build in space to house a base, "ammunition" for any type of weapons system, etc.
Klingons have been spotted around Uranus.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
What you have to do, is build a "giant laser" on the moon. Then you can hold the world ransom for 1 million dollars! MUAHAHAHA.
Moon based laser.
Sure there's a lil downtime every month, but when it's up...
watch out!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Get the high ground.
Two things come to mind.
+ rail guns
+ big honking telescopes.
The lack of infrastructure will slow any deployment
but not stop it. There was a blog or something about
ow hard and difficult is to build a toaster without global
resources so it will be HARD to build anything interesting
on the moon (or Mars)
What the heck is the format change all about.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Against the alien invasion
silarulz!
You don't need nuclear weapons from the moon, nor toxic weapons either. Apparently the moon has a rich supply of these mysterious city-killing weapons called "rocks" which, when catapulted out of the moon's gravity well naturally fall into Earth's. The Earth's gravity operates on the mass of the rocks, accelerating them to great terminal energy - enough to look as much like nuclear weapons as makes little difference. Done with sufficient precision, or simply enough quantity, it should be more than enough force to get the Earth to capitulate. Scary thought: the entire moon is made up of these disastrous weapons of mass destruction, which require no fine art to deploy. I read a book about it once, a long time ago. Wish I could remember the title.
Odd note of geek trivia: the "Toynbee Tiles" enigma is precisely about this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
On the "moon"
http://www.ironsky.net/
(From the people who brought you Sky Wreck)
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
If they have a self-sufficient moon base, the whole "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) theory of avoiding nuclear war with the soviets go away.
As they described it to us -- since both the commies and the US had enough nukes to kill everyone, noone would be crazy enough to launch.
However if one country has a colony on the moon; the whole MAD equation changes. Suddenly instead of "everyone dies", the result is "hey, if everyone on earth dies; I and my 144000 other colonists on this base will own everything!!!!"
The moon is a bug hunk of cheese, so who are you going to declare war on?
Baguette wielding Frenchmen?
We'd need to find a way to take out that jumping cow that's guarding the moon. Also, green cheese is really not the best substrate for building a moon base.
then a whole country can "moon" you!
It has military value if it causes a nation to divert resources from other, more pressing security and social issues in order to militarize the moon. But its military value is probably negative as previously stated by the other posts, but value none the less.
http://www.ironsky.net/
Go switch to classic discussion style, it still looks mostly the same other than the side bar.
Of course the moon has military value.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Madness
Also a good place to keep prisoners.
Be seeing you...
if your space commander isn't dead.
This reporter, Mark Whittington, is a Republican/Conservative reporter. Read any of his news reports on any issue such as the Gitmo prison, WikiLeaks, the financial regulations, the Ground Zero Islamic Center or the health care reform. He will start off bthis report by factually quoting a few people on either side of a given issue but will always slip in his opinion or editorial that is always pro-conservative and anti-Obama. You can check yourself by reading any of his reports. They are available by clicking on his name in the linked web page.
Even on this issue, notice the last paragraph written by him "The decision of the Obama administration to abandon the moon and apparent Chinese ambitions toward that celestial body has grave implications for the balance of power on Earth later this century." Oooooohh. Be very afraid.... Yeah, right! He is just like many other RepubliCons who hang out at the Weekly Standard or the National Review. They will will pick anything to bash the Obama administration.
Why not Mars, as in Martes. The name says it all!
Of course one of the previous posts said that the moon is the high ground and that is said in reference to Earth. But I would let a more sci/fi attitude to that, the planet without outer defences in solar system is ripe for destruction and we have no military resources out there. Even dealing with natural threat of asteroids we have better chances if we have outposts out there. On the other side what kind of chance do we have against a single ship out there bombing us with KEVs? No chance at all without posts in solar system. Moon should be the start. Of course that there are those who will see another round of weapons race and maybe he will also be partially right. But the truth is future of humanity is out there and we can hope that we will survive space weapons race as we did the nuclear race. Also who knows what awaits out there? But on the other side perhaps maybe someone knows more then us. What are we in the sea of starts? The survival of human race will probably take many changes in our society and for sure we wont like it at all.
I am reminded of the Battle of Midway, where Midway island was thought of as an "unsinkable carrier" and the plans for defense included heavy use of the airstrips on the island. The island was also far from resupply or support. Once the battle started, the Japanese, who knew exactly where Midway was, bombed the hell out of it. The primary strength of aircraft carrier is their ability to move; when properly used they're hard to find even while employing their airpower in combat. The moon, I think, is analogous in both the unambiguous location and difficulty of resupply.
See "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein.
The Moon is high ground relative to Earth, contains a ready source of very large rocks, and is a shallow enough gravity well that it would not be hard to throw the aforementioned rocks at the Earth with readily available technology.
It's doubtful you could turn a profit even if there were 24 carat gold bars lying on the moon surface waiting to be picked up.
Just need to repurpose that military mass driver (qf. earlier comment about flinging moon rocks as weapons). Of course, catching them might be problematic.
Parachutes would help. And come to think of it, you wouldn't even have to fold them up first.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
We already have plenty of ways to deliver large bombs to targets, ranging from ICBMs to trucks. Shooting them from the moon doesn't help. If you're going to attack assets in Earth orbit, they're far closer to Earth than the moon. The "helium-3" thing is a crock. We can't even build a deuterium fusion reactor, and that's easier than a helium-3 one. The only advantage to helium-3 fusion is that there are fewer radioactive byproducts. We can make helium-3; tritium decays into helium-3, and we can and do make tritium in fission reactors. That's probably cheaper than trying to mine a sizable fraction of the moon's surface for a very low density of He3.
The Gate Is Down.
That, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — that is all.
Cover a hundred kilometers square of moon with solar cells, collecting roughly 100 Watts/meter^2 (or one TW, peak). Don't worry, we just build robots that mine the materials and smelt and install the cells in place, using local materials.
Now build a really, really big maser. I'm talking big, now, Godzilla-sized. Remember, it's all a vacuum, so you can build uber-cheap, uber large tubes by just hanging the parts on the walls of simple stone partitions. Think of a kilometer high Klystron, or a Magnetron the size of the Metrodome! point the "waveguide" at the end back at Earth. Justify it all as a "solar energy project" that will beam all of that energy down to earth to power our flying cars by means of a simple antenna for free, no moving parts. Consumers can even cook hot dogs by just hanging them out the window!
But we will know better, mmwahahahah! If we just flip this switch here (oomph) and pull this lever then GZZZZAAAP! We've built a totally rad TW-scale death ray capable of focussing all of that energy on a target the size of, well, the size of...
Montana? How much would a 1 cm coherent TW beam spread out over 384,000 km, anyway?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
America can, nay must, blow up the moon.
short answer : no.
long answer : noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
(ps : the layout of ./ is get worse everytime)
Not sure if this counts as a military advantage, but using the moon as a testbed for getting to Mars and offering haven in case the world explodes (which it eventually will given humans) will lead to advances in many types of technology. I'm sure a lot of which will be applicable to military, such as improvements to automation, protecting against meteorites (I'm sure some that could equate to a 120mm cannon energy on a pin), and the logistics necessary to keep it operational.
Not everything is about the direct goal. Space and exploration in general has a lot to do with what you gain along the way. I shouldn't need to name off all the inventions and advancements that have been part of it. It's too bad many politicians and people in places of any power (army and ceos) are incredibly ignorant and short sighted.
Seriously it's not hard for the smart people that still have a say to make a nice little powerpoint showing what happens in certain scenarios with big nice pictures. Like showing the earth exploding and people on the moon raising their hands in excitement because they survived.
As a consequence, the chances of hitting anything you're aiming for, from the Moon, are pretty much zero. That doesn't mean the idea has no worth. Just like with all strategic bombing of civilian targets, the action is more to do with terror than inflicting damage.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"NASA's funding keeps getting cut, and yet we're spending trillions on war like it's nothing"
"War, eh? We can do that in space, sure."
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Sure it does. That's why the Germans went there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeAfoiN5SDw
It just depends on how many enemies you have and how bad are the relations, risk levels, and situation assessment. Get things bad enough and a handful of dirt and pile of rocks become weapons indeed. Just look at prisons. Everyone is an enemy, and plastic cups can become a knife in the right hands.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Only America could look at the moon and think "Could we put a railgun up there?".
"Despite the fact that under President Barack Obama's space policy, Americans will not be going back to the moon any time soon, discussions are occurring about what, if any, military value the Earth's nearest neighbor has. Opinions, as can be expected, vary on the subject."
We could always terrorize our enemies by carving "C" into the moon with a laser.
Clearly it does: http://lolpics.se/pics/2273.jpg
We must strike first!
And the moon is sorta part of space.
You can stick some guns to it, yeah.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
... but I heard about something called the SMoon.
beware of moon nazis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeAfoiN5SDw
I would hardly doubt that the moon wouldn't have some value to the military. So the answer is obviously "YES".
Thats no moon... it's a battle station.
There you go, we can even make it financially self-sustaining. WTF is everyone waiting for?
The moon is of no real value militarily or non-militarily today, but years down the line it will be. When population and energy resources get to a critical point on Earth there will be one of two things, War or Space. Going back to the moon was a great idea and having a base on the moon would be an even better idea, but that will not happen anytime soon. Mars will not happen for quite some time and will likely end in epic disaster stalling space expansion in general even longer. Not utilizing the moon is like Columbus being expected to launch Sputnik without provoking a European age of exploration first.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
...it's combined with 3 wolves.
ding!
C'mon, some villains in cartoons always had some super laser that worked really well from the moon. Considering the reasoning we've had going into some stupid wars, I'd say this is reason enough.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
There are military applications that don't equate directly to guns and bombs. There are probably a bunch of untapped resources there that could be valuable to us in general. For instance, it's a well known fact that the only reason we went up there in the first place was for whale oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Series_Has_Landed
Even though we didn't find it, I'm sure there has to be something else up there we can harpoon :)
-------------
Posting as AC because I'm just to lazy to create an account.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Agree on the new whitespacey layout. At least have layout options to avoid inflicting this shit on the unwilling.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)
Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net] ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)
Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
==
I also posted this comment elsewhere to this story but is not showing up well with the new Slashdot format which seems to collapse subsequent posts under low ranked parents:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1966606&cid=35008680
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is just bullshit.
1)Bbullshit that the moon could have military value when the US cannot even
"win" in Afghanistan ( and it never will, LOL ! ).
2) Bullshit in that the US National Debt is overwhelming already.
3) Bullshit that this article even needs to exist on Slashdot, where nothing but
meaningless opinions by those unqualified to comment will be spewed like
so much verbal diarrhea.
Has no one read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? Forget nukes. All you need to do us lob a rock on a ballistic path. Wipe entire cities off the map cleanly.
The news-piece is missing a clear military purpose. Maybe because it focusses on destruction only. Military purpose involves more than destruction however.
One vital potential military use of the moon, is for intelligence gathering. This can be SIGINT or ELINT, or Radar and Optical imaging. Basically, you can see the moon as one big reconnaissance satellite. Put a powerfull radar on it, and you can image your enemies' assets. Put a powerfull listening antenna on it, and listen in on the coms and signals of your enemy. Basically, al those thing that are now done by diverse military satellites such as the Lacrosses, FIA, KeyHole, Mentor etc.
The edge the moon has over a satellite is that you can construct much larger antenna, larger optical apertures, than you can in space. In addition, if you put them on a manned base, you can service them.
The moon can in addition also play a role as a ginat communication satellite.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
This is an interesting discussion, but I can tell no one here is a military strategist. The question posed is if the moon has any military value, a term that encompasses far more than just weapons. That term refers to two things, 1) can (your home country) Government use the military for a tactical advantage? and 2) can (your home country's enemies) Governments use the military for a tactical advantage over you, and should we deny them that?
Using the US as an example, the US is the most powerful military on Earth with no real peers today; they only run into trouble fighting multiple wars at a time (like now, they're overextended with no ground forces reserves). In a straight up, WW2 style fight they'd dominate, which is why our current opponents fight insurgency style fights; nukes, artillery, air power, etc. don't matter when you don't concentrate your forces and instead attack with hit and run tactics and hit civilian centers. The Moon at best is a large scale artillery platform, which is not something we currently need. So in this sense, the moon offers no advantage as a weapons platform.
But does it offer anything else? Would it be more useful in some way than satellites for observation/communications? If there was a base there and a way to deploy teams from the moon to Earth in a rapid way (a la Starship Troopers), is that more cost effective/quicker/more capable than current capabilities? Would you be able to deploy a rapid response Special Forces team to the middle of China in a way that you cannot do so with an amphibious assault or with an air drop (due to China's extensive air defense network)? Does it offer some special manufacturing/resource advantage that they low gravity/vacuum offers that you can't get on Earth? Mining is a poor choice; most of what's up there we can get cheaper on Earth, but Helium-3 comes to mind if the military wants to move into Fusion Research. Those are the types of questions being asked. I do believe the Moon may offer something militarily beyond just a weapons platform, and I think that as long as you don't arm whatever is up there except with point defense weapons, you're for the most part in the clear on the existing treaties banning weapons in space.
The only remedy to this problem is to blow the moon up.
That's no moon it's a space station!
Marginal military value of the moon: zero. Consider that we already have at least somewhat effective means of destroying enemy satellites in orbit, and could surely develop more effective ones cheaper than setting up a moon base. We also still have enough nukes to more or less resurface the earth. So as a place from which to launch weapons, you're not getting much bang for the buck here.
The other thing brought up by TFA is the old canard of He3 on the moon. 1) Call me when we figure out how to do something useful with He3. 2) He3 concentrations on the moon are on the order of .01 ppm - meaning you'd have to process a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get a ton of He3. That wouldn't be cost effective on earth, much less on the moon.
Nazis on the moon is the plot of the little-known indie sci-fi film currently in production, 'Iron Sky'.
And, really, who amongst us doesn't love a plot like that?
http://www.ironsky.net/
So many posters here have a totally unrealistic view of the costs involved in doing something like this. We're not close to being able to economically recover resources from anywhere in space.
We can already destroy satellites from earth just fine, thanks. And if current ground-based ASAT technology ain't good enough, you could sure develop more capable systems for a lot cheaper than colonizing the freaking moon.
Because the GP didn't say that Heinlein and Rand didn't know they were writing fiction. He said that certain READERS didn't know they were writing fiction.
... that anything you can do (in terms of military effects) from the moon, you can do from the earth, only a hell of a lot cheaper. We can bomb cities from earth already.
Example: someone just blew up a subway station in Moscow. Where did the bomb come from? Hint: not the moon. Regarding the top and bottom of the gravity well: so? We can already nuke any point on the surface of the earth. Adding the moon to the picture adds a lot of expense, but nothing really in terms of capability.
According to what I saw in the 50th anniversary retrospectives, the sputnik launch was was initially interpreted and military defeat for the US. The other side has superior ability to send weapons toward us and spy on us. To his credit President Eisenhower turned the debate into an international education competition and ushered in the golden age of science. The world still benefits from the afterglow of this initiative.
Several points: How can you tell a moon nuke launch from a satellite launch? They are going to look pretty much like a big rocket being shot into space. Second, how are you going to track a incoming moon nuke? If you can make fighters in the atmosphere stealthy, why can't you make stealth cruse missiles, stealth satellites, or stealth MiRVs? EM falls off with the square of the distance, so watching 'stealthy' things on 'radar' that are coming from vast distances through a medium filled with far more EM radiation and noise than in the atmosphere could be 'tricky'.
Combine that with the fact that I don't have to vaporize a moon installation to kill everyone, I just need to put a few stress fractures to vent all the air into space, and that there is no reason not to fire a ridiculously overkill 300 megaton warhead and I am pretty sure that MAD is still on the table.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
There's a pesky thing that the US and a few other countries (those with space programs, and those who wanted to play nice with the US, Russia, and China) have ratified named the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", or simply "Space Treaty". One of the major points of it is the agreement that no one will militarize space.
good thing nobody has ever broken a treaty before, whew!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Being at "the top" of Earth's gravity well, the moon is, sort of, the "ultimate trebuchet". Once a beachhead had been established, so to speak, with some relatively simple calculations (well, simple for the sorts of people that are capable of establishing a functioning moon base), one could simply lob largish rocks down at earth with enough precision and devastating kinetic energy to be a serious problem.
And, as far as tactical highground goes, it's profoundly defensible. One would need a very expensive and very rare, also very heavy, lifting rocket boosters to get from "the bottom" of said gravity well, to take any kind of meaningful offensive action against the installation (though the supporting ground-crew could find themsleves in a bit of a sticky situation I suppose).
That's just a simple scenario. I don't think the tactical potential of the moon has escaped anyone who gets paid to think about outlandish (but possible) wastes of tax revenue. i.e. Andrew Marshell, Director of the Defense Deparment's Office of Net Assessment.
Some might argue its value on this planet in terms of economics, but in terms of strategy vs. invasion from outside sources (yes...aliens...in case it ever were to happen...) this would be a deciding factor in allowing us advanced notice that something is coming our way, unless they had cloaking technology, then we would be screwed.
Exactly 144000 will survive the Apocalypse? Mark that down, that's the exact number. Is that the Gospel truth? What a Revelation! ----Jacob Roberson
Imagine the ripoff er, rrturn on patriotic assistance on a moon base! Iraq-AfPak will be mere peanuts!
It a shame some look at the Moon as something of military value when it's of far greater *scientific* value. Just the ice alone makes it attractive to return and this time stay. Enough with the "pick up the rocks and fling them to Earth talk" - that's just insane. The Moon is right *there*, it's our stepping stone to the rest of the solar system...
Only if one is not concerned by the prospect of our delicious green cheese being commandeered by commies.
Then it might be a trap.