Get the latest tech news
Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
Nuke might miss the moon and fall back to earth, where it would detonate, because of the planned design which would explode upon impact in the USSR in the non-USSR (causing international incident) Environmental disturbances Permanently disrupting possible organisms and ecosystems In maybe the strongest language in the piece, they describe this as “an unparalleled scientific disaster” They couldn’t do much about that but they figured this would be politically feasible, and that this was frightening because such a contamination would disrupt and scatter debris all over the unexplored surface of the moon – the closest and richest site for space research, a whole mini-planet of celestial material that had not passed through the destructive gauntlet of earth’s atmosphere (as meteors do, the force of reentry blasting away temperature-sensitive and delicate structures).
Or read this on Hacker News
