Actor Ed Helms is making his rounds to sell his book Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups.
One of the stories he tells is about the US “planting nukes on the moon.” Is this true?
Yes, it was a top secret effort called Project A119, with the goal of exploding a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. And believe it or not, Carl Sagan was involved in the calculations related to this zany idea.
This was in the late 1950s during the Cold War when the US and Soviet Union were doing everything they could to trump one another. It also was right after Sputnik, when the US felt it was losing the space race. In this case, the US would make a clear demonstration of its power through this distant explosion.
Fortunately, the US decided to take a better route by going into orbit and eventually to the Moon. If we had blown up the Moon, Carl Sagan would have been remembered in a very different way today – less as the educator, and more as Dr. Strangelove.
Just never underestimate the ability of the government to go down some dark roads. We needed guardrails then like we need them now.
You can read more about it in this History.com story.
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