America planned to NUKE THE MOON America once hatched a plan to nuke the moon, according to a report from CNN. The broadcaster interviewed one Leonard Reiffel, a former US Air Force physicist CNN says led the project to plan a lunar nuclear launch. Cold war paranoia drove the project, Reiffel says, with the plan calling for a conventional missile to be …
@JDX
I'm not so sure.
I think 4 of them think that it's your "what's wrong with nuking the moon" that's worth a downvote, and the other 3 think that whilst there would be a lot of collatoral damage, nuking the earth would take you out and therefore be just about preferable.
How the commies "saved us" from Uncle Sam....
- seized power without electoral mandate
- sadistically tortured political opponents to death
- forced their own citizens into slave labour camps in their millions but not admitting to it
- confiscated grain supplies from the peasantry and took away all their farm machinery so they starved to death in their millions (in the name of Collectivisation)
- forced their soldiers to advance or take a bullet in the back of the head (the Nazis never treated their troops this way), then encouraging mass rape of the women in occupied lands
- building walls and border fences to prevent people escaping rather than invading
- imprisoned the head of their rocket programme for political reasons (countless other less fortunate high profile persons were executed)
- building more nukes and subs than NATO
- building ever more powerful nukes while the US made their Minutemans smaller with improved targeting
- installing puppet governments in surrounding nations
- covertly supported communist takeovers in developing nations across the globe, again involving numerous executions and disappearances of political opponents
- infiltrating the West and using subversion to brainwash a generation of academics, students and the future educators and political class into self-hating, unpatriotic commie-loving traitors.
But you're right, nuking the moon would just have been a step too far!!!!
Thinking that the Russians wouldn't immediately begin their own program of Moon Missile Bases. Followed by skirmishes during construction of the two enemy instillations. The Yanks and Russians fighting astride giant moonworms and dewbacks. And finally the grim realization in Washington that their missiles needed wings and pilots to guide them, lest they accidentally hit London or Paris, while the Russians even then were practicing to drop space capsules on a ten kopeck piece.
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Depends on exactly what you are trying to test. The moon would yield lousy data on shockwave and other data. And it's remoteness actually makes gathering data rather more difficult.
On the other hand, if you have the tech to hit a specific spot on the moon and guarantee detonation, and you time it to go off when the moon is up over Moscow and making a very bright light that everyone can see, there is a certain fear and awe affect. This affect is particularly persuasive with the sort of atheist megalomaniacs who chatter endlessly about what kind of baby killing neanderthals Americans are when they are the real killer on the planet and fear nothing more than their own deaths.
Still I do prefer Reagan's solution on crushing them economically.
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>That anyone would think this was a good idea
Hmmmm... let me think....
I've got this enormous and unimaginably toxic nuclear device and I want to see if I can make it explode. Should I:
a) Drill a very deep hole into the bedrock of some uninhabited backwater of my own country, carefully lower my lethal contraption down the hole, plug the hole, then see if I can make it go bang.
OR
b) Pile said pile upon an even more enormous conventional bomb with a small hole at the bottom, light the fuse and run away.
It would be an interesting way to see the effects of a blast "first hand" with little danger. Lord knows that every little kid likes to blow things up anyway. And as for "disturbing the moon's environment", all I can say is that there isn't much of one there, just dust. Science might even discover something a bit below the surface, water for instance?
With little danger?
Does anyone know what destroying the moon will do?
Isn't it responsible for the sea's tides? I think the earth would go through some serious changes if the moon was destroyed.
Besides, if we accidentally killed all the aliens living inside the moon the mothership is gonna be mighty peed off...
Erm... nuking the moon is not the same as blowing up the moon. As other posts point out, the Earth has been nuked several times, to relatively* little effect.
Not saying I approve of nuking anything, terrestrial or otherwise, mind you.
*cf volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc...
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"I can imagine some dumb general chomping on his cigar, enthusing: "We'll light up the dark side - then those damn commies will be able to see who's the boss."
Perfectly reasonable statement, you do realise that once a month the dark side of the moon is facing the earth? (for any particular spot on the earth I mean). I am sure you are confusing the Far Side of the moon with the incorrectly named "Dark Side of the Moon" musical album by...um..musicians, not astronomers. Fair enough for them to make a mistake, being filthy rich musicians they probably know naff all about anything else, although I won't swear on that since I have never met any of them, but a reader on a tech site? Come now!
Hum.....I suppose that is "correct" depending on what you call "the dark side of the moon". Just to be slightly pedantic, the moon is tidally locked the the Earth, so, the same face points at us all the time (ignoring the fact that precession and such does add about 1.6% to the total visible amount). It is the Moon, going from the same side of the Earth as the Sun, to the opposite side to the Sun that causes the changes in the illuminated amount of the Moon's surface.
So...the only way to create a flash visible to the USSR would have been to time it so the missile hit as the new Moon was setting, and, making sure that a general broadcast through VOA alerted the population to the event. Frankly, though, it would not be worth the cost and effort, as the biggest bombs available would have had less energy than quite a few of the meteors that continually pound the Lunar surface. Much more effective to blow up an island, film the event, and broadcast it all over the places
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
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Demanding proof of negatives is actually very scientific, follow this thought experiment if you will.
I can prove the oxygen is toxic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity) and if you believe that you don’t have to prove negatives (in this case oxygen isn’t toxic) ,then you must agree that you would be better off living in an environment free of oxygen, as its toxic.
This is one of the things that annoys me about Richard Dawkins and his religion of god doesn’t exist, yes I called it a religion. If you believe god(s) exist good for you, if you believe gods(s) don’t exist good for you too. However, from a purely scientific point of view neither hypothesis, the existence or non-existence of god(s), can be proved so both are matters of personal choice, faith, or religion if you like.
You seem to be somewhat confused, and you are ignoring the logic of reasoning.
1. From a philosophical standpoint, believing does not enter into the equasion. My comment is about proof.
2. From a scientific standpoint, you believe someting to be the case, you can go about proving it.
In your case of oxygen, proving or disproving oxygen is toxic is proof in both cases. What Sagan seems to be postulating (from what I read about the man, I never met him) is that absence of proof of non-existance is proof of existance. This is pertinently untrue.
Again, this is not a matter of belief. It is cold hard logic. In the case of the existance of god, the fact that there is no(t yet) a unyfying theory of evolution in it's broadest sense does not equal proof of the existance of a deity.
I am sorry I can not make this clearer to you in a forum post, and I wil therefor shut up about the matter.
You may, of course, believe what you like.
Er, what? From a purely scientific point of view, there is no evidence whatsoever that points to the existence of any god or gods, therefore it is illogical to believe in any. If you choose to believe in any, that is your personal choice and is a matter of your faith, but it's not science. NOT believing in something for which there is ZERO evidence IS the scientific way. Doh!
Nah, nah, you're all wrong. The existence, or lack thereof, of any god is a non-testable hypothesis. There is no means of falsification, hence no theoretical basis by which the existence of a deity can be tested. There can never be "scientific proof" of the existence of god, or the lack, or even the possibility of a quantum superposition of states of God, because the very concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being is not falsifiable.
So to say that science can't prove God doesn't exist is correct. The scientific method can't be applied the idea, therefore it lies outside the realm of science, and any opinion on the subject is a matter of faith. Any opinion. Not just the ones that you don't like.
Same with m-theory and whole bunch of other stuff that gets waved around as "science" when it's just so much handwaving and fancy hypothetical models. Can't be tested, not falsifiable, ergo not science. Might as well claim the universe looks pink on the outside.
Your example shows all the signs of an immature and uneducated mind. The very basis of science is that the premise must be falsifiable, and that eventually all premises are proven false. See Popper, even the Wikipedia links will do for a quick orientation.
The question of the existence or non-existence of God is inherently non-falsifiable and therefore untestable by science. It is not unscientific, it is meta-scientific if you will, which was the original meaning of metaphysics. And metaphysics provides the logical underpinnings of science.
huh, if god does exist, he is a very evil, totally ignorant one... just think of all the very good spiritual people that die in awful ways...
Just remeber a good quote " anything sufficiently advanced, looks like the work of god, to a primitive society" especially if they do not know any truth about how the human body works...
My answer is, that god *may* have existed, but saw how stupid and evil people got, ignoring and totally changing his teaching, to just make money out of peoples suffering, etc, that he gave up on his 'project', and went away to another place, just leaving the mess behind....:(
Actually setting one off on the moon could have some pretty dramatic affects on the Earth. The atmosphere on the Earth provides a lot of material for interaction with the radiation, so it get absorbed into particles instead of propagating endlessly. On the surface of the moon there's nothing to absorb it, so it continues until it encounters something it can interact with. Since the blast would necessarily be directed toward Earth the most likely thing the blast would interact with is the van Allen belts. I believe the current thinking on that is it that at a minimum it will mess up radio and satellite communications for everybody on the planet for at least weeks. Potential affects of disrupting it on weather patterns: unknown, but given that at least a portion of the protective belt would be disabled it seems reasonable to assume it will have SOME affect. Likewise for certain types of cancer. Ozone would likely be depleted as charged solar particles would be likely to interact with it instead of being caught up in the belts. And on, and on, and on.
The sole potentially positive affect is the intimidation of your enemies. It is the last warning shot before all out nuclear war.
I'm glad I'm not part of that era where insecure human beings had to intimidate other insecure human beings just to get a foot-hold on the world. And the moon; well, it's magic as they say and looks freakin' awesome when close to the early on full moon. Glad they didn't blow it up. Peace. And beer because it's Friday for me today.
This is the sort of lunacy that was probably thought up by some jingoistic psychopath as he sat on his mother's severed and mummified head, masturbating with a fistful of his own faeces and giggling at a lampshade.
You would hope that at some point down the line, someone looked up from their slide rule and notebooks and went, "Wait - what? Why are we even...? This is completely insane. Im going out for a beer."
I wonder what kind of a NEMP that would have caused on Earth? Might have been, umm, interesting. After all, Starfish Prime did cause a bit of a blip in the power grid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Oh, and there's a reason that one was called "prime"; because the original Starfish failed due to a rocket failure. Whoopsie! Of course, the Starfish test wasn't nearly as bad as the Bluegill test, which required four tries before it worked (Bluegill, Bluegill Prime, Bluegill Double Prime, and Bluegill Triple Prime!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl#Bluegill
Ok, so what if there's a bit of Plutonium contamination of on Johnston Island? At least it's fate was better than that of Elugelab Island, which was an island in the Enewetak Atoll:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elugelab
Better there than in New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Mississippi, Alaska, err, umm, oh wait...
Dave
P.S. Mine's the one with the Iodine tablets in the pocket.
Back in the early days of atomic bombs (they were called nuclear weapons much later), little was know fall-out, radiation and their long term side effects. Atomic bombs were just seen as a tool that could big holes. Plans were made to make (Panama class) canals using atomic boms. To build instant harbors. To move riverbeds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosions
and for a blast from the past: http://books.google.be/books?id=ZC0DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false
The bad effects of radiation were understood before they detonated the first test bomb. Marie Curie was dead from radiation poisoning well before work on the bomb was started. And I believe they did have at least one accident that killed researchers working on the first abomb before it was detonated. It might not have been as well understood as it is today, but it was understood to be an effect. The pipe dreams you listed were pretty much that: pipe dreams from people who either didn't know what they were talking about or deliberately chose to ignore the affects.
at least one accident that killed researchers working on the first abomb before it was detonated
Not sure about the 'before', but in 1945 Harry Daghlian and in 1946 Louis Slotin died of radiation poisoning after criticality incidents at Los Alamos; Slotin definitely did know what it was that was going to kill him after his radiation exposure.
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