Yeah, this is some pretty weird stuff. There's been some buzz going on the internet about some strange government plans. The Freedom of Information Act has led to once-secret documents being shared with the public. Recently released files tell us some crazy things the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was working on. One of those weird plans was to nuke the moon.

Last week, Vice published an article on the reports and new information. There's lots of stuff in there including working on invisible cloaking technology, wormhole space travel, and more.  The segment about the moon being nuked was a part of a project that was working on negative mass propulsion. Scientists thought they could find extremely lightweight metals in the center of the moon, according to Space.com. In order to get to the center of the moon, we'd have to tunnel in using thermonuclear weapons.

The plan never went further than the hypothesis. Do you know what's even crazier? This isn't the only time the government has thought about nuking the moon.

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Back in 1958, the US Air Force asked scientists if they could figure out a way to hurl a hydrogen bomb at the moon to make a huge explosion. Oh 1950s America, you were really something. The US was lagging far behind in the space race, and the Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik over our heads in the previous year.

America needed a show of force. The USA needed to do something spectacular, and for a moment they thought nuking the moon was the answer.

H Bomb Cloud
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So they asked a bunch of scientists, including famous Carl Sagan, to do some calculations and to guess what kind of spectacle it would be.

Long story short, a nuke on the moon would create a lot of dust, but no real mushroom clouds or anything "atomic" looking because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere. Once again, probably a good thing the plan never was realized because as History.com explains, it wouldn't be a great thing for Neil & Buzz to be walking on a radioactive surface just over a decade later.

Now NASA has plans and is working towards returning to the moon with the Artemis program. The goal is to put humans back on the moon and have a long-term presence. The plan is to make it a spaceport for the next step in mankind: a trip to Mars. Fortunately, we haven't set off any nukes there, so radioactive moon dust is just one less thing for us to worry about.

LOOK: The most expensive weather and climate disasters in recent decades

Stacker ranked the most expensive climate disasters by the billions since 1980 by the total cost of all damages, adjusted for inflation, based on 2021 data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The list starts with Hurricane Sally, which caused $7.3 billion in damages in 2020, and ends with a devastating 2005 hurricane that caused $170 billion in damage and killed at least 1,833 people. Keep reading to discover the 50 of the most expensive climate disasters in recent decades in the U.S.

 

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