During the years of the Cold War, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, any one-time event in the USA or the USSR was susceptible to being misinterpreted and generating a new war on a global level – such as the Mistranslation of the words of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – and, at the same time, both tried to demonstrate their strength against the other. The most absurd and dangerous case of showing muscle was Project A119 … detonate an atomic bomb on the Moon .
In 1957, the Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth... Sputnik 1 . That launch put the USSR ahead in the space race and, moreover, was a blow to public opinion. In order not to be left behind, the US had to do something brutal to turn it around... in 1958 the US Air Force developed Project A119 to detonate an atomic bomb on the Moon. Due to the consequences of that muscle show it was decided to scrap this stupid plan. That project, like many others during the Cold War, was classified as Top Secret but a biography of the astronomer Carl Sagan published in 1999 raised the hare. According to his biographer, Keay Davidson , the young Sagan had been hired to do a mathematical modeling of the expansion of a cloud of dust exploding in space around the Moon. Confirmation of the existence of the project was given by the physicist Leonard Reiffel , who had participated in the feasibility study, in an interview for The Observer in 2000.
"I made it clear from the beginning that there would be an enormous cost to science in destroying the pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force was only concerned with whether the nuclear explosion would have any consequences on Earth and whether it would be visible... but, without a doubt, the project was technically feasible,” Reiffel said.
Project A119 was officially canceled in January 1959. To date, the Pentagon has neither confirmed nor denied this project.
Sources:The Guardian, The Shadowing Section, Examiner