U.S. Air Force Had Plans to Nuke the Moon

Declassified documents from the Cold War era show that the U.S. Air Force once had a plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the surface of the Moon. According to CNN's interview with Leonard Reiffel, the leader of the little known top-secret plan Project A-119, the plan was hatched in 1958 shortly after the launch of the world's first satellite Sputnik 1, which brought pressure on the American government to catch up with the Soviet Union's lead in space exploration. Had the plan been set in motion, the bomb would've been launched from an undisclosed location to travel 240,000 miles to the moon and blow up on impact, though Reiffel believes its effect on the Moon would've been more or less negligible.