Nuking the Moon. Project A119

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans I think John Lennon once said. Well here's a strange bit of trivia I recently stumbled upon.

The US once planned to nuke the moon. To upstage the Soviets launching Sputnik into space they planned to shoot the moon with a huge hydrogen bomb. The idea being to create a monster visual spectacle in order that they could thumb their noses at the USSR.

The team involved Dr. Leonard Reiffel, Gerard Kuiper, and astronomer Carl Sagan. Fortunately the plan never gained purpose, mainly because the visual spectacle imagined was not nearly as grand in reality. They landed on it, instead. Whew!