How fear of the Soviets inspired a U.S. scheme to bomb the moon

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The U.S. was so alarmed by the Soviets' successful launch of the Sputnik spacecraft during the Cold War that they considered detonating nuclear weapons on the moon, according to a historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

"The logic doesn't necessarily follow from A to B, but that was the decision that was made," said Vince Houghton, author of Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in October 1957, it was the first artificial satellite to enter into orbit around the Earth. The mission's unexpected success sparked widespread panic in the West based on the Soviets' unfettered technological advancements.

These public fears in the United States played a key role during the Cold War that led to the Space Race — the battle over dominance in spaceflight capabilities between the two countries.

The author spoke to The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti about the most outlandish schemes that U.S. spymasters dreamed up. Here is part of their conversation.

How did Americans react when they learned Sputnik was flying over the U.S.?

The broad strokes of the Cold War are about recruiting the developing world to follow either our ideals and our way of government, and capitalism and democracy, or the ideals of the Soviet Union — this idea of communism. … Part of this was arguing our system is more innovative, we're more creative, we're ahead of them scientifically, we're ahead of them technologically.

And all of a sudden the Soviets, who we'd always consider to be backwards, had beaten us at our own game. They had beaten us into space, and for a lot of American policy-makers and a lot of American citizens, this was terrifying. And we had to do something very quickly to rectify this situation. We had to do something very quickly to show the world that we were really the big kids on the block, the Soviets had just gotten lucky, that the United States was truly the country that was the leader in the world in science and technology.

Which brings us to the fact that the U.S. considers detonating hydrogen bombs on the moon.

The logic doesn't necessarily follow from A to B, but that was the decision that was made — mainly by the U.S. air force — [that] the best way to have a show of force, to show that we're boss, was to have the greatest spectacular demonstration of American might you could possibly have. And that would be to detonate at least one, perhaps multiple, thermonuclear weapons on the moon so that the whole world — at least the ones that were facing the moon at that point in time — would be able to see how powerful America was.

And this program wasn't something that was kind of thrown out there and then some junior scientists in the Pentagon basement said "I'll do this." ... These were not whack-a-doodle scientists.

These were big brains.

These were big brains. These are people who revolutionized science, not just in the West, but in the world, during this time, and they bought into this idea. They said, "Okay, this may be far-fetched, this may not be science, but we can turn this into a scientific understanding, we can make good science out of this." And so they took it on. They decided: let's investigate this program, let's figure out how we can do it and let's see if it's feasible or not.

What would have happened had hydrogen bombs detonated on the moon's surface?

Well, that's where the air force was very disappointed to hear that you would not get a standard mushroom cloud. That's what the air force wanted, right … a beautiful mushroom cloud there on the edge of the moon that everyone could see.

They wanted shock and awe.

They wanted to shock and awe. And they wanted the stereotypical kind of icon of a thermonuclear weapon.

Despite how horrible these weapons are, it's awe-inspiring. But mushroom clouds only exist in dense atmospheres like here on Earth. ... It wouldn't be what the air force wanted, [which] was this kind of symbolic "we're bigger and badder than you are" mushroom cloud on the moon. That's my argument for why the program got cancelled.

And is it clear why it got cancelled, or it just didn't happen?

No, and that's what's fun about this story.

There is no evidence in the archives about why the program was finally cancelled. No one can agree. And in all the arguments and documents and archives, you get words like "seemingly this was the reason" or "apparently this was the reason" or "we think this is a reason," which I love.

As a historian, those kind of mysteries are wonderful, because it gives us a chance to kind of get inside their heads and try to understand what they were thinking without it being force fed to us.

Click 'listen' near the top of this page to hear the full conversation.

Written by Kirsten Fenn. Q&A edited for length and clarity. Produced by Howard Goldenthal.