In 1957, Nobel laureate microbiologist Joshua Lederberg and biostatician J. B. S. Haldane sat down together imagined what would happened if the USSR d

Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon

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2024-04-23 05:00:02

In 1957, Nobel laureate microbiologist Joshua Lederberg and biostatician J. B. S. Haldane sat down together imagined what would happened if the USSR decided to explode a nuclear weapon on the moon.

The Cold War was on, Sputnik had recently been launched, and the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution was coming up – a good time for an awe-inspiring political statement. Maybe they read a recent United Press article about the rumored USSR plans. Nuking the moon would make a powerful political statement on earth, but the radiation and disruption could permanently harm scientific research on the moon.

What Lederberg and Haldane did not know was that they were onto something – by the next year, the USSR really investigated the possibility of dropping a nuke on the moon. They called it “Project E-4,” one of a series of possible lunar missions.

What Lederberg and Haldane definitely did not know was that that same next year, 1958, the US would also study the idea of nuking the moon. They called it “Project A119” and the Air Force commissioned research on it from Leonard Reiffel, a regular military collaborator and physicist at the University of Illinois. He worked with several other scientists, including a then-graduate-student named Carl Sagan.