Revealed: Carl Sagan’s Cold War-Era U.S. Plan to Nuke Moon

The U.S. Plan to Nuke the Moon: Cold War History and Aftermath

It may sound like science fiction, but a U.S. plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon was very real in the 1950s. At the height of the Space Race, the U.S. seriously considered exploding an atomic bomb on the lunar surface as a show of Cold War power. The classified project, innocuously named “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” and codenamed “Project A119,” was never carried out.

Project Details

The planning stages involved calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, then a young graduate student, on how the nuclear blast would affect lunar dust and gases.

According to physicist Leonard Reiffel in a 2000 interview, viewing the nuclear flash from Earth could have intimidated the Soviet Union and boosted American morale after the launch of Sputnik.

Reiffel, who directed the study at the Armour Research Foundation (now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology), later became a deputy director at NASA.

The plan called for launching a missile carrying a small nuclear device to impact and detonate on the lunar surface, visible from Earth.

Project Cancellation and Aftermath

Project A119 was officially canceled by the U.S. Air Force in January 1959, primarily due to concerns about potential risks and negative public reaction. The existence of the project remained classified for decades until it was revealed in 2000 by Leonard Reiffel. There have been no credible reports or evidence suggesting that the plan was ever implemented after its cancellation.

Confirmation of Non-Execution

We can be confident that Project A119 was never executed based on several factors:

• Official declassification and public acknowledgment of the project’s existence and cancellation.
• The lack of any observable evidence of nuclear detonations on the Moon’s surface.
• Continued scientific exploration of the Moon, including lunar missions by various countries, which have not reported any signs of past nuclear activity.
• The shift in Cold War space policy towards peaceful exploration and international cooperation, as exemplified by the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.

The signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 effectively prevented any future attempts to detonate nuclear devices on the Moon.

The United States ultimately chose to focus on manned space missions, culminating in the Apollo program and the successful Moon landings.

While Project A119 remains a fascinating historical footnote, there have been no new developments suggesting that nuclear weapons were ever detonated on the Moon’s surface.