The Defense Department Once Seriously Planned to Detonate a Nuke on the Moon
The classified program was formally titled ‘Project A119,’ and its primary aim was to detonate a lightweight, low-yield nuclear warhead on the surface of the moon, for all the world to see.
It was first proposed sometime shortly after the Soviet Union reached the first milestone in the so-called Space Race with the launch of Sputnik, the first functional satellite, into orbit on October 4, 1957. The launch didn’t catch anyone in the American government by surprise, but the U.S. Navy had been working on their own satellite - called Vanguard - for the previous three years, and were not particularly close to a launch when Sputnik started making its rounds. That was extremely worrying for a number of reasons.
Concerns grew even more two months later, on December 6, when the rocket meant to carry the completed Vanguard satellite, TV-3 (Test-Vehicle 3), into orbit exploded on the ground after rising just four feet into the air. Vanguard itself was irreparably damaged, and so a new one had to be built before they could have another go at it, and that was going to take months to get done.
The whole thing was a PR disaster, and made many within the American military and intelligence communities believe, perhaps wrongly, that the Soviets had surpassed us both militarily and technologically. If they were able to launch anything at all into orbit, that meant they had better rockets than us, and if they had better rockets than us, that meant they must have had better missiles than us, and if they had better missiles than us… well we can’t have that, they thought.
While the Navy continued to work toward putting a new Vanguard satellite into orbit, the Air Force began preparing an alternative response to this apparent show of Soviet technological superiority, and somehow, they eventually came to the conclusion that the most effective reply of this kind was one of even greater military might: detonating a nuclear weapon in space.
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