In the day's working reports, the same note kept recurring: giant science, fighting for attention and budget — Martian capsules, icy dwarfs, NASA's eternal struggle for project survival. And then I remembered hearing about a moment when the fight for cosmic attention reached its logical limit: in the late 1950s, both the US and USSR seriously studied how to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon. Not for science. For the picture. No one would get hurt, except the Moon — and possibly humanity's idea of itself. I dug in — and found out the primary source still sits in open access, and the story comes with a young Carl Sagan, a security violator, and Soviet physicist Zeldovich, who stopped himself.
October 1957 caught America in an unfamiliar position. Sputnik-1 went into orbit atop a Soviet intercontinental missile — meaning not just "a little circle in the sky," but a demonstration that the same rocket could reach Chicago. The American response, Vanguard, spectacularly exploded right on the launch pad, and British newsreels reacted with British snobbery: "failure... a serious defeat in the field of prestige and propaganda." Schoolchildren watched a cartoon with Bert the Turtle about how to hide from a nuclear blast, newspapers wrote about the "missile gap" and "bomber gap" — the conviction that the USSR was ahead in all military metrics.
In fall 1957, a notice appeared in the American provincial press with a headline that reads like surrealism today: "Soviet power plans to hit the Moon with a hydrogen bomb — by November 7, the anniversary of the revolution." Source unnamed, origin of the rumor hazier than the dark side of the Moon. But the rumor did something important: it normalized the very idea. If they can — why can't we?
The US Air Force in 1958 summoned physicist Leonard Reiffel from the Chicago-based Armour Research Foundation and asked him to "accelerate" work on a project later assigned the index A119. The official name sounded harmless to the point of yawning: "A Study of Lunar Research Flights." In fact, it was a plan for a nuclear strike on the Moon.
The task was formulated with astonishing honesty, considering who the reports were addressed to. Reiffel summarized forty years later: the main goal of the detonation — "a PR stunt and demonstration of superiority." The Air Force wanted an effect impossible to ignore: a flash visible from Earth with the naked eye — especially from the Kremlin.
The detonation site was chosen not by scientific but by theatrical criteria. The ideal option — the edge of the Moon at the boundary of light and shadow, the terminator: the Sun illuminates the ejecta, and the whole picture unfolds before earthlings' eyes. A separate detail that sources love to note: no "mushroom cloud" could exist in a vacuum in principle — Reiffel himself told the press about a "mushroom," but the physics here is merciless, only a flash and expanding dust cloud could work.
Scale: a bomb "at the very least no less than Hiroshima" — and the optical section of the report discussed a range from kilotons to megatons, calculating that the megaton option guaranteed fulfillment of the main mission — "to be seen." Delivery accuracy, by Reiffel's estimate, — about three kilometers from the intended point. For 1958, this is outstanding ballistics. Project conclusion: technically feasible.
The project team had ten people, and today only one of them is famous — the youngest. Carl Sagan, then a graduate student under astronomer Gerard Kuiper, got the task to calculate how the dust cloud expands around the explosion point. Everything depended on this: if the cloud wouldn't be visible from Earth, the whole point of the affair disappeared — the generals wouldn't stage a salute nobody would notice.
Sagan also had his own scientific interest. In those years, scientists still allowed that microbial life might exist in lunar soil — and he proposed using the explosion as a way to detect that life: crack open the surface and see what's inside. Sounds like anti-scientific cruelty, but in the context of the era this was almost progressive thinking: the only way to look beneath the Moon's surface — either a drilling mission, which didn't yet exist, or a very big hammer.
The story about Sagan, however, has a second layer. Biographer Keay Davidson in 1999 discovered in Sagan's application archive for the prestigious Miller Fellowship at Berkeley details of the secret project that shouldn't have been there. That is, the future great science popularizer, without knowing it (or knowing — the file isn't publicly accessible, here sources hit a wall), exposed a military secret through a graduate application. Reiffel put a period on it in a letter to Nature in 2000: "in my opinion, Sagan violated security in March 1959."
The most interesting thing about the A119 story — not the bomb, but what the scientists managed to negotiate from the military. Planetary scientist Adeene Denton, who dissected the surviving 1959 report page by page, showed: hidden inside the military order is a full-fledged lunar scientific program — optics, seismology, radiation measurements, surface chemistry. The team proposed scattering across the Moon in advance three identical instrument packages with seismometers and radiation sensors.
Then begins what I can only call passive sabotage in academic style. In the seismology section, the authors suddenly digress from the explosion for several pages and insistently explain: a single seismometer on the Moon, without any explosion, will yield "a significant body of interpretable data" about the satellite's internal structure. In the radiation section — the same song: the very same equipment they propose for measurements after the detonation "is capable of conducting meaningful measurements" without detonation. Translating from academic to human: buy us lunar instruments, and the bomb can go undetonated.
There were more exotic moves. To enhance flash visibility, the report discussed adding 100 kilograms to 100 tons of sodium: when vaporized, sodium fluoresces yellow — a tracer that both the US and USSR had already tested in atmospheric tests. A separate gem — reasoning about radioactive contamination of the Moon: under conservative assumptions, background should drop to cosmic levels in a month or two, but "maybe not," and the decision about the acceptability of this "maybe not" the authors politely left to the reader.
While America calculated dust clouds, a mirror idea ripened in the USSR — but with a different motive. According to the memoirs of Boris Chertok, one of the fathers of Soviet rocket technology, the plan appeared in 1958, and the goal was not to intimidate but to prove: a small station reached the Moon, but who will verify it? A crashed station with conventional explosives isn't visible from Earth or through telescopes. But a nuclear flash on the surface — irrefutable confirmation of arrival, a photograph that observatories worldwide would take. The Soviet version answered the question of trust, the American — the question of fear.
The initiator of the Soviet project was Yakov Zeldovich — one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. The project with index E-4 reached the mockup stage at Korolev's OKB-1: a container with a charge conceived as an anti-ship mine, with initiating rods in all directions to trigger at the slightest surface contact. Mass and dimensions were dictated by the nuclear weapons designers — designs of those years were clunky and heavy.
Then they started pulling the project apart at the seams, and every seam proved critical. First or second stage rocket failure — and the charge falls on one's own territory. Third stage failure — and it falls on someone else's, with an "extremely undesirable international incident" attached. A miss — and the bomb goes into eternal flight around the Sun, which also doesn't add peace of mind. And a purely bureaucratic trap that reveals the depth of absurdity: for the explosion to count, foreign observatories needed advance warning — but how do you explain to the world that you're warning about a nuclear explosion on the Moon you haven't yet decided whether to do? According to historian Alexander Zheleznyakov, Zeldovich himself initiated the closure.
The projects died quietly. The Department of Defense closed A119 in spring 1959 — for reasons that, by the participants' own admission, no one explained to them. All eight of Reiffel's reports were destroyed by the foundation in 1987, nine monthly project reports shared the same fate. Essentially one document survived — that very report from June 19, 1959, which today can be downloaded from the National Security Archive scan archive: a rare case where a "secret project" can be read in the original from your laptop.
The exposure happened anecdotally. In 1999, Sagan's biography came out, and the biographer stumbled on those very details in the fellowship application. Reiffel, by then a 73-year-old science veteran, Apollo program deputy director and inventor of the telestrator — that very device commentators use to draw arrows on football replays — went public himself. In an Observer interview and letter to Nature, he restored the historical truth: yes, there was a plan, yes, there was a PR purpose, yes, I warned we'd destroy the pristine lunar environment, but the Air Force was only interested in "how it would look from Earth." And the final phrase, more honest than you can say: "I am horrified that such a gesture for public opinion was even considered."
As for the Moon — it got off with a scare. Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, assessed the consequences of a hypothetical explosion matter-of-factly: "just another small crater." Ten years after the projects were cancelled, people stood on the Moon with flags and seismometers. Precisely those that the A119 authors wrote about in their quiet requests "can we do it without the bomb."