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

Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by justin_vanw on Monday February 29, 2016 @12:23AM (#11193735)
There are too many impossibilities and errors in this to even consider it as remotely factual.

- ICBMs can't reach the moon, or even anything remotely close to it

- Mushroom clouds don't form in a vacuum.

- The fact that some Air Force officer thought it would be a neat idea (if any of this is factual) does not in any way imply that it was even remotely considered by anyone with the authority to make such a decision, any more than seeing a person who works at the Apple store drinking a coke implies that Apple Inc is buying the entire CocaCola corporation.

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Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by versteegen on Monday February 29, 2016 @05:53AM (#11194727)
By "mushroom cloud" they must have meant the ball of dust thrown up by an explosion at/below the lunar surface. That is why Sagan would have suggested it as a possibility for detecting micro-organisms.
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Re:The US Air Force's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the... by justin_vanw on Monday February 29, 2016 @07:59PM (#11200083)
But it still wouldn't make a cloud, it would just scatter dust, and each particle of dust would fall back to the moon in a ballistic trajectory (it would not last long at all).
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