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Saturday, August 19, 2000

'50s Plan Weighed Nuclear Moon Blast

By John J. Lumpkin
Journal Staff Writer
   Before John F. Kennedy dreamed openly about sending a man to the moon, the United States thought about blowing up a chunk of it.
   A Cold War plan hatched at Kirtland Air Force Base in the late 1950s proposed detonating a nuclear weapon on the moon to send a strong message to the Soviets.
   As bizarre as it sounds today, try to understand the proposal in the context of frenzied months after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, said physicist Leonard Reiffel, who led a team of scientists in reporting on what science could be gleaned from such a detonation.
   The United States and its Western allies worried the Soviets were gaining the technical edge. They detonated larger and larger nuclear bombs and were ahead in their space program. Reiffel said there was a clear desire to "slow down the stampede of anybody who thought they could overwhelm the United States."
   Enter a proposal to nuke the moon for all the world to see.
   Reiffel said he did what he could to discourage this project.
   "I did not think it was an experiment that should be carried out, although I understood the motivations and the emotions of the time," he said this week in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. "I'm happy to look back at history and know it was not carried out."
   Reiffel later became a deputy director at NASA during the Apollo program.
   Reiffel's report, obtained from Kirtland through the Freedom of Information Act, details what sort of blasts would be visible to the naked eye back on Earth and even contains discussion on what effects Earth organisms carried on spacecraft could have on native lunar life or fossils.
   The last, Reiffel said, "was something no one took particularly seriously with the exception of Carl Sagan."
   Sagan, who worked on the project, later gained fame for his musings on extraterrestrial life.
   Reiffel's report, dated June 19, 1959, is innocuously titled "A Study of Lunar Research Flights." It was commissioned by the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland, but much of the scientific work was done at the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
   Reiffel said the plan never reached any sort of operational planning.
   While his report is largely scientific, Reiffel said it was clear to everyone involved that a nuclear detonation on the moon would primarily serve to demonstrate U.S. military prowess.
   "You would reassure the West that it was not naked before this great Soviet technological sword," he said, adding he believed the original idea was hatched at "quite high levels" in the government.
   The report mentions detonating nuclear weapons up to one megaton in size. The explosion and damage would have been visible but localized. The moon has taken far worse hits from meteors over the eons, Reiffel said.
   His skepticism for the proposal is apparent in the foreword of the report.
   "Specific positive effects would accrue to the nation first performing such a feat of advanced technological capability," he wrote. "It is also certain that, unless the climate of world opinion were well-prepared in advance, a considerable negative reaction could be stimulated."
   The report suggested the blast could help reveal information about seismology and the moon's composition and magnetic field.
   But "what would have been learned by this particular experiment would have been minor indeed compared to what mankind knows now," Reiffel said.
   The moon was at the center of other military strategy debates at the time, he said. Some worried the Soviets would claim the entire satellite by reaching it first, as the European empires did the New World during the colonial era.
   Others thought the moon, on a sort of gravitational "high ground," also could serve as a military base from which to observe or launch attacks at targets on the Earth's surface, he said.