The space race of the 20th century forced the superpowers to organize impressive actions to amaze the world community and their own citizens. The United States, whose residents were shocked by the launch of the satellite and the flight of Yuri Gagarin, regained their "space prestige" only after the landing of a man on the moon in 1969. However, the Americans considered other possibilities to impress a potential adversary. Developed in the bowels of the US Air Force in the 1950s, "Project A119" assumed a nuclear strike on the moon.
Objective of the project
The idea to make an explosion on a natural satellite of the Earth was first expressed in February 1957 by Edward Teller, the creator of the American hydrogen bomb.
For those times, the very fact of a nuclear explosion in space was not something exceptional - America had already tested warheads, taking them out of the earth's atmosphere.
However, the strike on the moon was planned as a larger-scale action. Its task was to demonstrate the US military and space superiority over the Soviet Union, and at the same time to stimulate the national patriotism of Americans.
These plans remained unknown to the general public until the 1990s. Writer Kay Davidson, who was studying the biography of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who in his youth made calculations of the consequences of the explosion, came across the documentation of Project A119. After some time, the facts were confirmed by the project manager, physicist Leonard Reyfel, who collaborated with NASA. However, the US official authorities did not recognize the existence of Project A119.
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Project details
Since the action had propaganda purposes, its initiators thought, first of all, that the explosion could be observed from the Earth.
In May 1958, the Illinois Institute of Technology's Armor Research Foundation was involved in the project. Scientists had to predict how a nuclear strike would turn out and figure out how to make the dust cloud from the explosion larger. For maximum visual effect, the bomb was supposed to be dropped in the area of the terminator of the Moon - the line separating the light side of the celestial body from the dark one. In this case, a cloud of dust, illuminated by the rays of the Sun, would have a silhouette visible even to the naked eye.
The Americans were unable to deliver a heavy hydrogen bomb to the Moon, so it was decided to use a small W25 warhead with a uranium-plutonium charge of 1.7 kilotons. At the time of the development of the plan, the military did not yet have delivery vehicles capable of reaching the moon, but work in this direction was rapidly advancing.
In January 1959, the Air Force command canceled Project A119. Experts believe that the project could be curtailed due to the fact that it looked ambiguous even for the Americans themselves. In addition, there were concerns that in the event of an unsuccessful launch, the warhead could fall into populated areas. Leonard Reiffel also made an argument related to the future possible colonization of the moon - a nuclear explosion could reduce the amount of suitable areas for this.
Did the USSR have similar plans
To prepare US public opinion for the bombing, information about the existence of Soviet plans to arrange a thermonuclear explosion on the moon was transmitted to the newspapers. It was reported that Moscow was allegedly planning to take such a step by the anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7, 1957. The 40th anniversary of the establishment of Soviet power just coincided with a total lunar eclipse. As you know, nothing like this happened.
Meanwhile, the USSR had a series of plans, united by the letter "E". They began with reaching the lunar surface (E-1) and ended with the explosion of a nuclear charge, outwardly similar to a sea mine (E-4). The last project was proposed by the nuclear physicist Yakov Zeldovich, who later himself insisted that it not be implemented. However, not all experts agree with this version. Baikonur veteran Gennady Ponomarev, for example, categorically denies the possibility of a Soviet nuclear explosion on the Moon.
Note that in 2007 the fantastic series "The Great Star" was released, which shows, among other things, the atomic bombing of the lunar surface.
Timur Sagdiev