NASA s Secret Plan to Nuke the Moon (Project A119)

It sounds crazy today, but at the height of the cold war the US Air Force put together a special team tasked with determining what would happen if the US were to launch a nuclear missile at the moon. Besides obvious geopolitical motivations to show the Soviets the US's power, many scientists of the day backed the plan. At the time, we didn't know much about the moon, and these scientists believed that detonating a nuclear device on the moon could teach us a lot about what it's made of and how radiation moves through space.