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U.S. Had Plan To Nuke The Moon
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon May 15, 2000 08:37 AM
from the stupid-use-of-technology dept.
from the stupid-use-of-technology dept.
Jeffy was one several people this weekend who writes: "According to this article, The U.S. planned on detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon in the fifties to 'one up' the USSR and sway public opinion on the States' military might. An interesting twist to the story is that Carl Sagan was hired to help do the math to make sure the explosion was big enough to see from earth." Well, this isn't really news for nerds, but the whole idea behind nuking the moon strikes me as such a sad commentary on the Cold War that I had to post. The thinking behind this was such a pissing match it astounds me -- but here it is.
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The US Had Plan To Nuke The Moon
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Yup. Got that right. (Score:5)
And as an Armoured Recce guy, I had to memorize and _keep_ memorized Soviet ORBATS, tactics, and weapon/vehicle capabilities so that I'd recognise the bad guys when they came calling.
But a couple of years ago, after the Wall fell, I had an opportunity to meet one of my counterparts from the Red Army, and we got to talking about "old times". And what he told me was that they were all waiting for NATO to invade _them_!
And he managed to give great examples of our "threatening stance"
A minor lesson in tactics - the nature of modern armoured warfare is that it is impossible to contain a localized bit of ground. The enemy can concentrate his forces and always overwhelm localized defenders. If you share a border with a bad guy, and you each have 1000 tanks, then placing your tanks at equal intervals along the border will do nothing when the enemy throws all 1000 tanks at one spot.
Accordingly, the way you defend against armoured units is to place lightweight screening units up front, and have progressively larger and heavier units staged behind them. The screening units make contact, and report back to the heavy units, who then determine where the attackers are going and counterattack in mass.
It's called "defense in depth". To defend against Divisional-level assaults requeres about 100km of depth.
However, the West German wasn't too keen on the idea of the first 100km of their country being given up by default and used as a battlefield. They wanted the invaders stopped at the border.
Well, NATO knew that this just wasn't going to happen, but political expediancy required them to come up with a solution. And the solution they came up with was that as soon as the balloon went up, they would _immediately_ invade East Germany and attempt to penetrate 100 km in and set up the defensive screen. Tactical nukes would be used to blunt any thrusts pushing into West Germany, and the units pushing into East Germany would be used to cut off the attackers.
What this looks like on the ground are large mobile units massed close to the border - exactly what an invasion force would look like. Because it _was_ an invasion force.
Now the Soviets had more experience with large-scale armoured combat than anyone. They KNOW what is required to defend against armour. And every time NATO would tell them "we're just going to defend ourselves against agression" the Soviet generals would look at the troop distributions in West Germany and go "We know what defenses look like, and those are NOT defensive formations" - and they'd go make another 10000 tanks.
The two of us discussed this for quite some time, and when we finally understood each other, we had a good laugh over it all.
That's not to say that the Soviets weren't very interested in promoting Communism - they were, and they persued that agressively. But they never seriously considered Napoleanesque annexation by force of the whole of Europe like we feared.
Re:Sad commentary? (Score:5)
Second, picture this. The Russians discover that a quadrillion-tonne nuclear warhead has been fitted to a rocket. Their spy-planes discover that the rocket is on the launch pad, target unknown. The Russians have a total xenophobia of America (and likewise in reverse). The Russians are aware of American military leaders advising an attack on Russia, before Russia got too big. The only weapons you have, capable of stopping an attack by America on Russia are nuclear missiles. If you were in the Russian's shoes, what would YOU do?
The Americans miscalculate the position of the moon, and the rocket goes into a free return path. Space debris, radiation and other nasties, by this time, have destroyed any self-destruct system. (Assuming any was installed. This WAS early on, remember!) The rocket detonates on impact with Earth, wiping out whatever continent it strikes. Because of a total clamp-down on any information regarding the missile, surviving nations declare all-out world war, using whatever conventional and nuclear weapons that existed. Life on Earth is obliterated. For ever.
Another possibility. Terrorists capture the warhead, and threaten to detonate it. Because of the secrecy involved, the security forces involved in negotiation and/or attack are NOT advised that the warhead is nuclear, OR of the capability of the warhead. The forces storm the terrorists, who detonate the bomb. The world dies in unspeakable agony. The End.
The size of the warhead is miscalculated. The missile strikes a fissure in the moon. (The moon cooled VERY quickly, when it formed, maybe in less than a year. That's going to make for very low-grade rock.) The moon is literally blown apart. Earth is struck by massive rocks, wiping out half the population. The loss of the moon destabilises the Earth, which wobbles wildly. Seasons cease to exist, and all life dies in a catastrophic ice-age.
The Americans succeed in hitting the moon. The moon survives. The Russians (who, at that time, had vastly superior space technology) launch an even bigger rocket and an even bigger nuclear warhead into space. Repeat all of the above.
The Russians and Americans get into a huge space-based arms race, contaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium. Space science is set back a hundred years, due to radiation affecting radio astronomy, planetary destruction rendering space probes useless, and the impossibility of ever landing humans on any other world. Humanity is confined to Earth and dies of stagnation and/or over-population and/or exhaustion of resources.
In the end, humanity has only reached the year 2000 because of the FAILURE of projects like this.
USSR used to use nukes for civil engineering (Score:3)
Re:Nuke the moon, Nuke Vietnam, Nuke Korea (Score:3)
Of course!
That was called "Open Force Warfare"
"Better Battles Trough Peer Review"
It was generally percieved as a better alternative to "Closed Force"
Actually that is why the military (MilitSoft) was split up into separate branches (Army, Navy, etc) by the Justice Department.
Re:Weak idea (Score:3)
I might point out that they didn't have that many sattelites in the 1950s....in fact I think they had a total of...what...zero or sometimes one?
The Second Amendment Sisters [sas-aim.org]
Re:Considering the alternative (Score:3)
In the 1840s.
We are not talking about Imperialism or Manifest-Destiny in the 19th century. We are talking about Soviet-era expansionism and Cold War upsmanship.
The US also occupied and ruled Haiti. The United States annexed Puetro Rico, Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Cuba was spun off in...1899 and the Phillipines in 1948.
Re:Sad commentary? (Score:3)
If Germans had been encouraged to be feeling and caring, rather than brutal and cold to their children, the Kaiser might never have risen to power, and Hitler might never have become a sadistic mass-murderer, hell-bent on getting revenge.
All in all, there WERE plenty of ways that humanity COULD have stopped World War 2, and even World War 1. Humanity chose paranoia, domination and abusive punishment, instead. It got the only reward that was possible.
Before people look to violence and arms to resolve their differences, they need to look to themselves to see why the differences even exist. Violence is not only the last resort of the incompetent, it's also the first. If war is the price of incompetency, may whatever God that exists PLEASE make humanity competent. Now.
Re:At least they didn't plan to blow it up (Score:3)
Re:Sad commentary? (Score:3)
All leaders rise to power, EVEN those "born to it". Any hereditary ruler can find themselves out of power, any time the "ruled" choose. If you read English history, you might want to take a squint at King John (who tried to supplant his brother as King, several times, and who faced all-out rebellion by both peasents AND nobles).
Hitler didn't "just need to be hugged". That's a pathetic attempt to twist some well-known history. Hitler was beaten regularly by his Jewish father. Not for any particular reason, just because his father believed kids should be beaten. (I wonder why Hitler hated Jews so much... Couldn't be any connection, could there?)
Then, Hitler fought in Wold War 1. Suffered horribly, there, like many Europeans. Americans have no concept of how destructive that war was for Europe. EVERY family lost at least one son to that war. More often than not, all of them. The death-toll for EACH SIDE at the Battle of the Somme, over a period of a few days, exceeded the entire death toll on ALL SIDES COMBINED through the ENTIRE Vietnam War.
Poison gas, generals as keen on shooting their own men as they were the "enemy", nobody knowing who was fighting or for what, the firing squad at even the slightest excuse (or none at all, if the general decided that the troops needed encouragement), shell-shock was rife, bayonet charges through barbed-wire fences, in mindless attacks on heavily-fortified machine-gun positions...
And after the war, Germany was stripped of much of it's land. the Treaty of Versaies was punative more than anything. With no money, virtually no men (most died in the war), minimal industry, senseless deprivaion by the ruling elite in Germany, morale didn't just hit rock-bottom, it went through the floor, out the other side, and was living in Hell.
Under those conditions, Hitler (suffering from many ailments, both physical and mental) offered a way out from this living death, the only way he knew how. Through power and terror. Just like his father, and just as he'd seen in the war. The examples set were all ones of might making right, and fear & terror were the ways to discipline and maintain "order".
That's not the mark of someone who is evil. That is the mark of a seriously sick mind, that badly needs a LOT of treatment. Maybe, by the time anyone realised Hitler -was- that sick, it was too late to do anything, given the lack of understanding back then.
However, that is not the issue. The issue is that monsterous actions come from sick people, who get sick from the mix of fear, hate and violence. The whole of both World Wars, the Cold War, and the strife in the Middle East exist because people still brew that evil mixture.
IMHO, there's a simple enough way out. Don't Mix Them. If the USA had done that from the get-go, there would have BEEN no Cold War. No Korean War. No Vietnam War. And the former USSR would have had no control over any of them.
By now, we'd have Orion rockets commuting between here and Alpha Centauri. We'd have a space program to be proud of, not this debris.
Other sources available (Score:3)
Here's [observer.co.uk] a source from The Observer, a fairly reputable UK Sunday newspaper. It's not a good idea to discriminate on the basis of a domain name. Obviously if there's nothing else to go on, then you may be suspicious, but as a rule, that kind of discrimination just makes you sound like Eric Cartman ("It must be written by hippies, and hippies suck!).
US Budget (Score:5)
Option 1:
Option 2: Nuke the moon!!!
Such an easy decision.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
They didn't understand (Score:3)
Which is of course also the reason that these civil engineers could propose these kind of things: most (if not all) of the results were classified. So generally people only knew it was dangerous, but they had no idea how dangerous or long-lasting the effects were.
And then of course: the people suggesting these things probably knew absolutely nothing about nuclear physics. These guys were most probably civil engineers or maybe just politicians.
xchg
There are worse options... (Score:4)
For example I prefer this to the French alternative of the South Pacific. They don't even have the excuse of the cold war anymore to hide behind anymore.
Re:USSR used to use nukes for civil engineering (Score:3)
The Japanes governement was absolutely committed to defending their homeland to the last man, woman, and child, to go out with a blaze of glory, making the Allies pay with blood the price for every sqaure inch of Japanese soil. They were in the process of equipping every able-bodied citizen with everthing from an awl to a pitchfork, and indoctrinating the public on the need for resistance to the death.
These facts are borne out in the Japanese government's public statements as well as in their most secret coded transmissions, the code of which the Allied had cracked years before.
The US learned some terrible lessons in Okinawa, the predecessor to an invasdion of the Homeland: I believe US losses topped 10,000, Japanese forces lost 100,000, and it was estimated that one-third of the civilian population was killed. The Japanese themselves knew the war was lost (as per an internal study commisioned in late '43 or '44) but there was no corresponding easing of their resolve. Indeed, in the three weeks after Harry Truman assumed the Presidency, there were more US casualties in the Pacific than in the previous 3 years of combat, total!
There's so much more to say, but time won't permit. I haven't even touched upon the inhuman treatment Allied POWs suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors, from the Bataan death march to beheadings, and the hatred many American's fealt towards the Japanese aggressors responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, among them American fathers, sons, and brothers.
ANY reading of the history of this period will not make one feel better about the use of Fat Man and Little Boy, but it will convince the reader that the nuclear solution was the least obscene of the variety of obscene possibilities dictated by the circumstances of the war.
At least they didn't plan to blow it up (Score:5)
I was at Iowa State University in the past. There is a nutty math professor who wants to blow up the moon. He believed that the moon being absent would turn Earth into paradise. The name began with an A, I think. I don't really remember.
We all had lots of fun when his plan made the cover of the Weekly World News....
Monday.. Work.. Ick.. Later.
more commentary on the commentary (Score:3)
the whole idea behind nuking the moon strikes me as such a sad commentary on the Cold War that I had to post. The thinking behind this was such a pissing match it astounds me -- but here it is.
Sad Commentary? -- surely. Astouding? -- maybe you had to have been there.
I'm feeling like a dinosaur that I can actually remember the Cold War (the end of it, at least, I was born in 1965). I didn't realize until years later how much the Cold War mentality had shaped my childhood. For example, in high school I wrote the government for plans on how to build a nuclear bomb shelter (and got them!). I don't know what disturb me more: that I asked for them or that they sent them to me!
In recent years I've worked with people a decade or so younger than myself and have found that they lack that visceral, subconcious understanding of what it was like. It's the same odd feeling I still get when I hang out at the pool with my younger friends. They (born after the early 70's) don't have small-pox vaccination scars. It took me a while -- staring blankly at their left shoulders -- until I figured out what was missing.
Secret Govt Plans (Score:5)
Nuclear Explosion in a Vacuum (Score:5)
Nuclear explosions in a vacuum are boring, just a quick flash and they are over. Most of the impressive effects seen on Earth during nuclear tests are due to the fact that the atmosphere is opaque to soft x-rays. An exploding nuclear device can be looked at as a black-body radiator with its peak in the soft x-ray region. The fireball that we see on Earth is caused by the repeated absorption and emission of photons by molecules in the atmosphere in an expanding shell around the nuclear device. This converts the energy from soft x-rays into visible light and heat. The radiation also converts nitrogen in the atmosphere into an opaque nitrogen oxide "smog". The blast wave is produced by the heating and expansion of the atmosphere. The mushroom cloud is the result of the hot fireball of heated gases rising through the atmosphere like an air bubble in water. None of this would happen on the Moon.
Nuke the moon, Nuke Vietnam, Nuke Korea (Score:3)
The early cold war years are often characterised by generals just itching to try out the new nuclear toy. With politicians often being the controlling factor preventing them.
Thats the scary bit, politicians acting as the only buffer.
Don't make too many assumptions... (Score:3)
The fat man bomb needed compression this precise, but that doesn't mean that every nuke does. There's more than one way to build a nuke (I've only studied the first two, but that's enough to spot the error in your claim), and the trick is not to make the bomb explode, but to keep it from exploding before you want it to.
Plutonium is fairly complex to fully ignite (damn stuff keeps blowing up partway before you can put it all together; you have to make the shift from safe to critical mass by fiddling with the chemical structure), but U235 bombs can be touchy. The little boy bomb could easily have been ignited by an external explosion from the wrong direction.
People talk about "compression" of fissionable material to cause a nuclear blast, but this is only an implementation detail. What really causes the blast is "critical mass", or enough stuff packed close enough together to get a positive feedback chain reaction as fission begets neutron begets fission. For example, just building a 64 kg sphere of U235 in vaccuum or open air would result in a nuclear detonation (if you could build it fast enough, without the parts melting down on you as you brought them near to each other). Lighter nukes are made by reflecting the neutrons that would escape back into the pit.
Scattering the fissionable material of a nuke would still be a pretty nasty mess. "In reality" I think the bomb squad would strongly prefer disarming a nuke without explosives.
Another thing that can happen is for nukes to melt down without actually detonating. This could have happened with little boy bomb, if it was damaged or defective and water got into it. This could easily destroy a rocket and spread nuclear waste over a large area.
Actually, a detonation after launch would be less dangerous than a meltdown or catastrophic rocket failure. The worst thing that could happen in such a moon shot is that all the fissionable material would survive, but be scattered over a wide area.
Go see the nuke faq [fas.org].
The REAL reason WHY they did'nt do it (Score:4)
Somewhere, Robert Heinlein is smiling (Score:3)
--
Re:At least they didn't plan to blow it up (Score:3)
Unfortunatly, Alexander Abian passed away last year. His collegues in sci.physics and sci.math miss him very much.
Abian's Iowa State homepage(last updated 4/28/97) [iastate.edu]
Abian's obituary [demon.co.uk]
A tribute by A. Plutonium [swarthmore.edu]
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Why the moon sucks. (Score:3)
Man first went to the moon 30 years ago, and discovered that it was NOT made out of cheese.
We haven't been back since.
"Behold the power of cheese."
Munky_v2 [dialug.org]
"Warning: You are logged into reality as root..."
Re:Environmental effect? (Score:3)