Our species has seldom come as close to extinction as we did during the Cold War, when two superpowers and their allies were knife’s edge for decades. When not fighting each other through proxies, America and the Soviet Union often engaged in macho threat displays, like two gorillas pounding their chests. Some threat displays were subtle, while others were as subtle as a hammer to the head. As seen below, the machismo got bizarre at times, like when the US explored nuking the Moon.
Sputnik Gave America a Serious Scare
Early in the Cold War, despite the Red Scare and anticommunist hysteria, most Americans felt relatively secure at home from foreign attack. Even after the Soviets detonated their first atom bomb in 1949, few doubted America’s nuclear superiority. Nor did we doubt the superiority of the US Air Force and its bombers’ ability to nuke Russia, while our fighters kept Russian bombers from nuking us back. Then in 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite. Decades removed from the event, it is difficult to grasp in 2025 just how terrifying that was to Americans of the 1950s. It instantly shattered their serenity and sense of security. Sputnik itself was harmless. However, Soviet rockets powerful enough to launch it into space were powerful enough to launch atomic weapons at the US.
People were reasonably confident that the US Air Force could stop Russian bombers. Few believed that anything could stop Russian rockets. America’s sense of invulnerability evaporated. To restore American confidence, many ideas were bounced around. Many of them were plain weird, but few were weirder than nuking the Moon. In the late 1950s, America’s space program was on the ropes, while the Soviets were scooping us with successful satellite launches and demonstrating the power of their rockets. So the Eisenhower administration came up with a secret project, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights”. As seen below, the project’s innocuous title masked its true, and truly weird, purpose: detonating a nuke on the Moon.
Nuking the Moon to Restore American Confidence, and Scare the Soviets
The former Armour Research Foundation, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, was tasked with the research part in “A Study of Lunar Research Flights”. IIT’s researchers included a then-young graduate student, Carl Sagan, who in later years would go on to become a global celebrity and popularize science and astronomy on TV. Sagan contributed to the Moon-nuking project with research and calculations. Specifically, he studied the expected behavior of the dust and gas caused by a nuclear detonation on the lunar surface. The project envisioned an American nuclear-tipped missile that would launch from Earth, travel 238,000 miles to the Moon, and detonate upon impact.
As recounted decades later by an official involved in the project: “Now it seems ridiculous and unthinkable. But things were remarkably tense then”. The US government hoped that seeing the nuclear flash on the Moon from Earth would restore American confidence after the Soviets scooped us with Sputnik. Simultaneously, it would intimidate the Reds by demonstrating that America had an effective nuclear deterrent. The plan could have been carried out by 1959, when the US Air Force began to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). However, the project was abandoned because of the risk to people on Earth in case of failure, and because scientists raised concerns about contaminating the Moon with radiation.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Guardian, The, May 14th, 2000 – US Planned One Big Nuclear Blast for Mankind
History Halls – When the US Air Force Accidentally Attacked the Soviet Union During the Cold War
Los Angeles Times, May 18th, 2000 – US Weighed A-Blast on Moon in 1950s
