Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Nuke the Moon: Project A119

Starting point is 00:00:00 At the height of the Cold War, the United States considered a plan so audacious that it almost sounds like science fiction. They wanted to detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon. Known as Project A119, the idea was born from fear, prestige, and an urgent need to answer the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race. The plan was real, the scientists involved were some of the most noteworthy of the 20th century, and the implications were enormous. Learn more about Plan A119 and the quest to nuke the moon on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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Starting point is 00:01:42 time to keep the fun going. To understand Project A119 and what would drive people to want to nuke the moon, you first have to appreciate the atmosphere of near panic that gripped the United States in the autumn of 1957. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union took the lead in the space race with the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. That small beeping aluminum sphere, roughly the size of a beach ball, shattered American assumptions of technological supremacy and raised a terrorizing implication.

Starting point is 00:02:21 If the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they might be able to deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere on the planet. It was in this environment of anxiety and fear that someone in the United States Air Force asked a question that would have seen insane in any other era. What if we detonated a nuclear weapon on the moon? Believe it or not, the idea didn't come out of nowhere. According to press reports in late 1957, an anonymous source had disclosed to a United States Secret Service agent that the Soviets planned to commemorate the anniversary of the October Revolution by detonating a nuclear device

Starting point is 00:03:00 on the moon to coincide with a lunar eclipse on November 7th. Whether this rumor was genuine intelligence or Soviet disinformation was unclear at the time, but it reinforced the idea that the Moon was about to become a new theater in the Cold War. The intellectual groundwork for thinking about nuclear explosions in space had already been laid. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb in February of 1957, proposed detonating nuclear devices both on and at some distance from the lunar surface to analyze the effects of the explosions. The Armour Research Foundation, or ARF, based at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, had been positioned for exactly this kind of study for years.

Starting point is 00:03:46 The ARF began studying the effects of nuclear explosions on the environment as early as 1949, and by 1958 it had become the natural home for such programs. Project A119 was a top secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The name was deliberately dull. It was the kind of bureaucratic title designed to be forgotten in a filing cabinet. However, the contents of the plan were anything but ordinary. In 1958, Dr. Leonard Rifle, who worked at the Armor Research Foundation, was asked by the Air Force to fast-track research into what a nuclear explosion would be like on the moon.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Rifle was born in Chicago in 1927 and collaborated with Ecofermi, who created the world's first atomic reactor at the University of Chicago. He was rigorous, discreet, and politically savvy enough to understand what he was, was really being asked to do. The plan was laid out in a paper titled A Study of Lunar Research Flights Volume 1, which described the following scenario. The United States Air Force would launch a rocket to the moon carrying an atomic fission bomb, as hydrogen bombs would be too heavy for the mission, and once it reached the moon, avoiding any crater, it would explode. There were actually two different layers to this project. The surface layer was scientific.

Starting point is 00:05:11 The explosion might reveal something useful about the moon's geology and composition through patterns in ejecta and seismic activity. But the deeper purpose was purely psychological and political. The Air Force wanted to surprise the Soviets and the world by saying, hey, look what we can do. We can blow up the moon. A visual detonation on the lunar surface, seen by millions of people around the world without the aid of any telescope,

Starting point is 00:05:39 would declare American technological capability, in the most dramatic terms possible. The target was chosen carefully. Detnation was to occur strategically along the Terminator line, the border between the moon's light and dark sides. This was not an accidental choice. A blast along the Terminator would be illuminated by the sun at a low angle, maximizing the visibility of any expanding dust cloud against the darkness of the lunar night.

Starting point is 00:06:08 A 10-member team led by rifle was assembled at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago to study the potential visibility of an explosion, the benefits to science, and the implication for the lunar surface. One of the members of this team was Gerald Kuyper, who was one of the most distinguished planetary scientists of the 20th century. He was the man whose name would eventually be given to the disk of icy bodies beyond Neptune, the Kuiper Belt. His presence on the team gave it scientific credibility. But his most consequential, contribution may have been his recommendation to bring in one of his graduate students. Carl Sagan.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Sagan was then a graduate student who modeled how the gas and dust cloud would expand in glow gravity. Sagan was just 24 years old, brilliant, and already prolific, and his assignment was among the most technically demanding aspects of the entire project. It was important that someone like Sagan could accurately model the expansion of the dust cloud caused by a nuclear explosion. on the moon, so they could determine whether the explosion could be seen from Earth. The team worked through 1958 and into early 1959. Rifle produced multiple technical reports, and the project gained a real momentum within the Air Force Special Weapons Center, its institutional sponsor.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Now, at this point in the story, I want to address the question of what would actually happen if a nuclear weapon were detonated on the moon. There are two things that make the moon different from the Earth for the purpose of this discussion. The first is that there is only one sixth the gravity, and the second is that there is no atmosphere. The most dramatic effects of a nuclear explosion on Earth, the blast wave, the fireball, and the mushroom cloud all depend on the atmosphere. Mushroom clouds from a nuclear explosion are caused by the movement of dust and debris that is kicked up into the air. The moon, however, is essentially a vacuum. Without air to compress and superheat, there's no shockwave propagating outward from the explosion.

Starting point is 00:08:18 The energy that on Earth would be transferred into a crushing wall of overpressure has nowhere to go in the conventional sense. Similarly, without an atmosphere to ionize and superheat into an incandescent fireball, the visual signature of an explosion on the moon is dramatically different. Instead of those familiar atmospheric effects, the energy of the detonation would be directed towards three things. Intense radiation, vaporization of the surrounding lunar regolith, and the ejection of surface material. The bomb and everything immediately around it would be instantly vaporized into superheated plasma. That plasma would then expand rapidly outward in all directions, not as a contained fireball, but as a rapidly dispersing, cloud expanding into a vacuum. Without gravity to constrain it and without atmosphere to slow it,

Starting point is 00:09:11 that ejecta cloud would travel enormous distances across the lunar surface, and some material might actually achieve escape velocity and be lost into space. The crater produced would depend on the weapons yield. The bomb and vision for Project A119 was comparable in yield to the Hiroshima a bomb, which was roughly 15 to 20 kilotons. Given the moon's lower gravity and the lack of an atmosphere, the resulting crater would be significant, but by astronomical standards, pretty unremarkable, roughly comparable in size to many, many naturally formed craters on the surface of the moon. The initial fallout from the blast would be significant for days or weeks, however, it would soon be overwhelmed by the background radiation from cosmic rays, which

Starting point is 00:10:01 the moon's surface is 200 times greater than that on Earth. The Earth is protected by both its atmosphere and its magnetic field, and the moon has neither. The big question for the researchers at that time, and the entire purpose of the project, was whether you could actually see a detonation from Earth. That was the core question that Sagan was tasked with. Rifle and his team concluded that it could be faintly visible under the right kind of. conditions. For example, if there was a crescent moon and an explosion on the night side, visibility might be possible. The key insight was that the most visible element would not be

Starting point is 00:10:45 the instantaneous flash of the explosion itself, but the expanding dust cloud, which could then be illuminated by sunlight for longer than the milliseconds of the primary burst. Placing the detonator along the Terminator line, as planned, would allow sunlight to catch the plume of ejected material against the dark background of the lunar night sky. If the detonation was near, say, the equator of a full moon, you almost certainly couldn't see it. And I should note that meteors impact the surface of the moon all the time, many at much higher energies than an atomic blast. Almost none of these have ever been observed by the naked eye. Also, pretty much nothing would happen to the moon. There would be another relative

Starting point is 00:11:31 small crater on the surface, and that's about it. It would not alter the moon's orbit in any measurable way. The gravitational relationship between the Earth and the Moon would have been entirely unaffected by a weapon whose energy output is a rounding air compared with the forces governing planetary mechanics. Project A119 was canceled in early 1959, and the reasons were a mixture of strategic, scientific and practical concerns that together made the plan unfeasible. The most immediate concern was the risk of failure. Military leaders feared a negative public reaction to such a blast and that the missile could miss the moon entirely,

Starting point is 00:12:12 returning to an unloan location on the surface of the earth. An intercontinental ballistic missile that missed the moon and fell back towards a populated area would be catastrophic, and the risk wasn't trivial. Concerns over serious damage to the moon, as well as potential casualties on Earth, if things went wrong, ultimately killed the program. There was also the question of public perception. As the blast might have been visible to the people on Earth, the Air Force decided that the public might respond negatively to the militarism of the moon. The project remained deeply classified for nearly four decades. The existence of Project A-119 was essentially unknown to,

Starting point is 00:12:55 the mid-1990s, when a Carl Sagan biographer stumbled across classified details of the program in Sagan's 1959 scholarship application to the University of California, Berkeley. By listing classified work in a fellowship application, Sagan had inadvertently created a paper trail that would eventually unravel the secret, though it would take decades for anyone to notice. There is one interesting epilogue to the story. In 2010, recent, recent, researchers were going through documents from the former Soviet Union. And what they discovered is that the Soviets were, in fact, thinking about detonating a nuclear device on the moon, just like the Americans thought they were. And oddly enough, they came to the exact same

Starting point is 00:13:42 conclusion that the Americans did and decided not to do it. Project A119 was one of the honest moments of the Cold War. It wasn't even so much about the proposal to nuke the moon itself that was odd, although that was odd. It was the desperation on the part of the Americans to do something, anything, to regain the status and prestige that they had lost with the launch of Sputnik. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside

Starting point is 00:14:30 the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Nuke the Moon: Project A119

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