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

Are you convinced the U.S. Air Force, at the height of the Cold War, in the wake of the shocking launch of Sputnik and the fear left in its wake, scrapped A119 because it might muss up the moon a little bit?

Neither am I.

One of the most interesting components to this whole story is why Leonard Reiffel, after all those years maintaining his silence, decided to go public. He did it because of Carl Sagan, and a conviction that Sagan broke the law.

Many of us remember Carl Sagan as the man who authored, coauthored, or edited more than twenty books, like the extraordinary Pale Blue Dot, or the much-better-than-the-movie Contact . Others might remember him as the popular television personality, who brought the universe into American households through the 1980 series Cosmos.

But if Leonard Reiffel is correct, Carl Sagan should have been known more for his unauthorized disclosure of classified nuclear secrets. Sagan seems to have included his role in the project on his application for an academic scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959—just after the cancellation of the program. On his application forms, Sagan listed his qualifications and accomplishments… which happened to include two classified papers from A119: Possible Contribution of Lunar Nuclear Weapons Detonations to the Solution of Some Problems in Planetary Astronomy and Radiological Contamination of the Moon by Nuclear Weapons Detonations .

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to ferret out what those papers were talking about. (Although it’s likely several actual rocket scientists were evaluating his application…)

So what did Sagan have to say about all of this security breach hubbub? He died three years before it became public, and would never get a chance to clear his name.

But what about the rumors of a Soviet plan to nuke the moon that surfaced just after Sputnik? Those rumors were totally unfounded, and based on God only knows what information, likely someone’s vivid imagination. The crazy part is, they were right. Sort of. There was no Soviet plan to nuke the moon in November 1957. Yet that doesn’t mean the Soviets never intended to do just that. In fact, not long after the rumored November launch, the Soviets actually decided to begin planning for their quest to conquer the moon. It was called the “E-series” of programs. E-1 had the mission to hit the moon, and accomplished this on September 14, 1959, when the spacecraft Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the moon. E-2, launched on October 4, 1959, as Luna 3, sent back the first pictures of the far side of the moon. E-3 had a similar “fly-around” mission, but failed to achieve orbit.

E-4 was the doppelgänger of Project A119: Explode a nuclear device on the moon’s surface. Fortunately, this idea was dismissed along with its American counterpart. The Soviets were afraid of a failure to launch, which could drop the nuclear warhead back onto Soviet soil. Or even worse, a partial launch failure, which might drop the warhead on someone else’s soil, causing (in wonderful Russian understatement) “a highly undesirable international incident.”

Hard to argue with that.

What were these people thinking? The million-dollar question. What inspired intelligent, accomplished, and serious men to put forth the absurd ideas highlighted in this book? Projects and programs that ran the gamut from wacky, to inexplicable, to downright certifiable. Brilliant scientists and engineers. Savvy world leaders. Decorated military officials. Seasoned agency directors. Men not usually taken to flights of fancy or wild propositions. What caused world governments and their military and intelligence agencies to take them seriously enough to devote vast resources to developing them? Why were they willing to entertain these particularly outlandish proposals?

Historical context is key, of course. These ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They are the products of the times in which they exist—from the carnage of World War II to the fear that resulted from the uncertainty and tension of the Cold War. These men were terrified. They held the future of their countries, even humanity, in their hands.

They were desperate. And these programs were the result.

But how would these programs fare today? Could ideas as absurd, dangerous, and outright abominable be funded and explored now? The imminent threats of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are no longer present, but that doesn’t mean we have less capacity for demonizing, dehumanizing, and killing one another. We are just as vicious. Just as inhumane. Equally as likely to vilify our neighbors as to welcome them. We are still capable of horrible things, and just as capable of rationalizing those actions with the justification of “national security.”

We are no better than our ancestors. Just a little less desperate.

Yet that could change in an instant. It’s altogether possible we are more susceptible today to acts of desperation, even without the menace of a true existential threat. The reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the extremes to which we were willing to allow our government to go in our names, is testament to this fact. Nearly the same number of Americans died on 9/11 as in the attack on Pearl Harbor. That’s bad enough. But imagine if Al Qaeda had the wherewithal to pull off a follow-on attack, or a series of attacks on the United States. Or, God forbid, what if Al Qaeda was able to deploy a weapon of mass destruction in an American city.

I’m not confident we wouldn’t embrace ideas in the vein of some of the more egregious ideas in this book. Are you?

In fact, we have no way to know what ideas might be getting tossed around at this very minute; what scientific and technological schemes might be under development by our governments today. It’s a secret—for now at least.

The good news is that none of the ideas in this book ever came to fruition. Logic, rationality, sometimes the sheer luck of superseding events prevailed. In some cases, the better angels of our nature intervened on our behalf. “And we call ourselves the human race,” JFK is thankfully said to have declared in disgust after hearing one particularly aggressive nuclear plan. If history is our guide (and hopefully it can be), any outlandish ideas currently under scrutiny will be scrapped before they get off the drawing board.

But you never know. If the neighborhood stray cat suddenly takes an unnatural interest in your private conversations, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The case studies in this book come from stories that I have either read or heard about over the years as part of (1) conducting my own research on separate topics, (2) my job as historian and curator of the International Spy Museum, or (3) chatting with my friends and colleagues in the business—and sometimes this means swapping fun stories, usually late at night, while trying to one-up each other with the most crazy, outrageous thing we can think of. “Have you heard the one about…” or “This thing is totally insane…” or “You’ll never believe what I read in the archives last week…”

It’s nerdy, but it’s fun.

So while I came in knowing the broad outlines of each chapter, I turned to a range of sources to fill in the specifics (and make sure things actually happened the way people told me they happened): primary and secondary source literature, archival research, archival literature, expert interviews, and broad-ranging scientific, intelligence, foreign policy, and national security policy perspectives.

In this section, I will try to provide you with the sources I used for specific references within the chapters (direct quotes, statistics, budgetary numbers, factoids, and so on). I don’t expect most of you to have the time (or the inclination) to schlep to an archive to hunt down a government document. That’s okay, because other kind and enterprising people have put a lot of these docs online. Where they are available, I will provide you a link. Sources are listed in order of importance to the chapter.