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A comment on The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon (2000).

Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by bootload on Sunday February 28, 2016 @08:42PM (#11193247)
"Reiffel was approached by senior US Air Force officers in 1958, who asked him to 'fast-track' a project to investigate the visibility and effects of a nuclear explosion on the moon. "

Was the US Air Force capable of launching a missle to the moon in the late '50s, early '60's?

Lets say they chose the Atlas. Lets be generous and say the Atlas E was chosen (Lockheed , first launched in Feb 24, '61) [0] it was capable of an 820Kg payload into low orbit. The interesting bit, for the total life of this particular rocket there were "9 successful launches, 7 partial successful launches and 2 failures."

Hardly a reasonable plan to get a bomb to the moon. Nothing really happened until Wernher von Braun was put in charge of the F1 and by then the target was a manned mission.

[0] http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app3/b-2.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#NASA_career

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Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by valarauca1 on Sunday February 28, 2016 @08:59PM (#11193285)
a project to investigate the visibility [...] of a nuclear explosion on the moon

So the thought process was literally, "I wonder if we could see a nuclear explosion on the moon?"

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Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by bootload on Sunday February 28, 2016 @10:09PM (#11193411)
@valarauca1 good point, though I'm sure there was a good reason behind this. Did someone think this might be a one-up on Sputnik? Anyway I'm glad it didn't go through. The success rates for US Air Force rockets at that time wasn't good.
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