Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Lucian: “The former [Archimedes] burned the ships of the enemy by means of his science.”

Galen: “In some such way, I think, Archimedes too is said to have set on fire the enemy’s triremes by means of pyreia.”

Maybe this happened. Maybe it didn’t. Everyone from French philosopher/mathematician René Descartes to American philosophers/pyromaniacs the MythBusters has dismissed this story out of hand.

But you know what? I don’t really care if it’s true or not. These two stories are apples and oranges. They shouldn’t be considered in the same breath.

Why? Well, there are three key reasons why the Archimedes story/myth is of very little consequence to the Nazi sun gun concept:

1. Archimedes wasn’t in space.

2. Archimedes isn’t said to have used a mirror three and a half square miles in area (in space).

3. Archimedes wasn’t in space.

(And it’s a silly story anyway.)

Igrew up in Florida, the dumbest state in America.

No, not by any quantifiable metric. Florida ranks in the middle of the pack in things like literacy rate, college degrees, median household income, and so on. There are many Floridians among the most educated people in the country.

But in Florida, even the smart people are stupid.

Consider the following examples, each of which occurred in just the last three years:

• Twenty-three-year-old Joshua James of Jupiter, Florida, was arrested for throwing a three-foot alligator into a Wendy’s drive-thru window instead of payment for his food. He was charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of an alligator (yes, this is an actual law in Florida), and banned from Wendy’s everywhere.

• Tracy Rosner, a teacher at Coral Reef Elementary School in Miami (five minutes from where I grew up!), was denied a position at the school. The job she applied to involved teaching Spanish for an hour a day. The reason she wasn’t hired? She didn’t speak Spanish. She sued the school district, arguing that since non–Spanish speakers are a minority in Miami-Dade County, she should deserve special status.

• A twenty-eight-year-old Fort Walton Beach woman decided to close her eyes and pray—while driving her car. Apparently Jesus isn’t much of a driver either, because the woman/Lord missed a stop sign and ran directly into the side of a house. The woman was charged with reckless driving. Jesus apparently got off scot-free.

• A Deltona high school painted the asphalt in front of it with the word “School” spelled as “Scohol.” Twice.

• John Bradley Kane, fifty-five, was arrested for insurance fraud after police deputies said he lied to investigators about an incident outside a local Hooters. Kane hired a lawyer to file an insurance claim against the restaurant chain, alleging he had been struck in the foot by the letter “o” from the Hooters sign that had blown off the wall during Hurricane Irma. Surveillance video of the night showed the letter falling without hitting anyone… and later showed Kane stealing it. Also, according to the restaurant’s manager, Kane and some friends came back to the Hooters with the fallen sign and asked for food and drinks in exchange for the stolen “o.”

Speaking of Hurricane Irma, this next story might be the most Florida of all the Florida stories. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

Other than the stifling heat, oppressive humidity, Zika, European oligarchs, bath-salt-crazed face-eating zombies, sports futility, extreme poverty coupled with unrealistically high costs of living, rampant unconcealed racism, corrupt municipal, county, and state politics, rising seas, eroding beaches, and crumbling infrastructure, Florida is a paradise on earth.

Unless you count the hurricanes. So many hurricanes.

If you’ve lived in Florida for any length of time it’s likely you’ve experienced your share of inclement tropical weather events. I have lived through twelve of them. Hurricane Andrew was the worst for most of us, but Katrina, Wilma, Rita, Irene, Floyd, Charley, Frances, and Jeanne all left a mark on many South and Central Floridians. (I didn’t experience all of these personally. Some hit too far to the north. Of course, I moved to the mid-Atlantic just in time to get walloped by Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy.)

It gets old after a while. Another storm. Another week or two without power in the middle of the Florida summer. More trees down. Rooftops gone. More insurance claims. You have to find ways to take things in stride, or you’ll go crazy.

Some people throw hurricane parties. Booze, games, and heaps of great food that will all go bad when the power goes out and takes the refrigeration with it. Hurricane Andrew hit at the tail end of lobster season, and I ate like a king for a solid week.

Other people have… different… coping mechanisms. Just prior to the landfall of Hurricane Irma in September 2017, a Facebook “event” page was created calling for Florida gun owners to shoot at the hurricane in an attempt to either weaken it or change its course. The page exclaimed: “YO SO THIS GOOFY LOOKING WINDY HEADASS NAME IRMA SAID THEY PULLING UP ON US, LETS SHOW IRMA THAT WE SHOOT FIRST” [multiple emojis redacted].

Yeah. Sounds about right.

Of course this was a joke (right?), but what’s particularly Florida about this story is that more than eighty-five thousand people indicated that they were “interested” or “going” to the event. Maybe they were joking too, but the (real or faux) interest in shooting at the hurricane felt potentially serious enough that the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office tweeted, “To clarify, DO NOT shoot weapons @ #Irma. You won’t make it turn around & it will have very dangerous side effects.”

What a time to be alive.

I mean, what could possibly be stupider than shooting metal projectiles into a tropical cyclone? There’s enough crap already flying around in a hurricane without adding more to the mix. This has to be— has to be—the most asinine idea anyone has ever had involving launching things into hurricanes. Bullets?! Seriously?! How idiotic.

The only thing possibly more astronomically stupid than bullets would be missiles of some kind—hell, let’s say nuclear weapons to up the ante—and there’s no way anyone could be that dumb.

If only that were true.

In the 1950s,a group of scientists and government personnel pushed for a program to test the potential of using nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. I know that sounds like yet another paradox. How can the world’s most destructive weapon be used for “peaceful” applications? But this was new technology, and who knew how it might change the world? Even the Soviets were thinking more broadly about how to use nukes—their Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program wound up exploring concepts very similar to those tested by the United States.

In 1957, scientists from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (remember them from Brilliant Pebbles?), Los Alamos, and Sandia laboratories held a classified conference to discuss the possibilities of using nuclear weapons to produce power, dig out huge excavations, and produce known or then-unknown isotopes for scientific (and perhaps medical) usage.

On June 6, 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) publicly announced the establishment of the “Plowshare Program,” named for Isaiah 2:4: