Thursday, December 05, 2013

Project A119: Nuke The Moon

          Not another chapter in I Work On A Starship.  Not the IMAO Moon-nuking-for-world-peace proposal, now over a decade old.  Nope, the very real USAF Study of Lunar Research Flights, Project A119 from the late 1950s.

     "According to one of the leaders of the project, physicist Leonard Reiffel, hitting the moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish, including hitting the target with an accuracy of about two miles."

     Okay, then.  That'll put a scare in them Rooshians aliens.

     (The Wikipedia article says the USSR thought about it, too.  Luckily both sides had better sense, 'cos you know, if one had, the other would want to do so, too and next thing you know, the Moon would be totally unrecognizable and the Apollo astronauts would've had to wear lead longjohns.)
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5 comments:

  1. JosephDecember 6, 2013 at 1:55 AM

    That might have turned the Moon into a lifeless barren wasteland where nothing can grow!

    ReplyDelete
  2. TamDecember 6, 2013 at 6:45 AM

    Yeah, jus think of the damage to Gaia that was averted!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Roberta XDecember 6, 2013 at 8:29 AM

    ...Luna, Gaia, Venereal, whatever.....

    ReplyDelete
  4. TamDecember 6, 2013 at 8:58 AM

    My choice of words was quite deliberate. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Roberta XDecember 6, 2013 at 9:23 AM

    Yep, I knew. Just being difficult and rude.

    ReplyDelete

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