Email this article
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 1, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------PENTAGON PLANNED TO NUKE THE MOON
By John Catalinotto
I didn't know the Pentagon planned to nuke the moon.
I just knew that Sputnik paid my way through college.
Sputnik was the world's first artificial satellite. The USSR launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, before the U.S. had attained the ability to send a satellite into orbit. Soviet science stunned the world with this accomplishment, especially the U.S. military and political establishment. They had believed that the socialist Soviet Union, arisen from economically backward Russia and then devastated by the World War II Nazi invasion, could never leap ahead of them in space.
Sputnik provoked a huge increase in scholarships for scientific subjects as the U.S. rulers desperately sought scientific-military dominance in the space race.
A generation of U.S. youths, fascinated by mathematics, physics, or engineering, had wondered how they could afford to study these subjects in college and graduate school. After Sputnik, they had to wonder no more. Even young women were encouraged to study science.
During my first semester at City College of New York, my physics instructor, a right-wing Ukrainian emigré, made it clear why we students had to study hard and learn fast. "We have to beat the Russians," he said.
But the establishment's reaction did more than provide scholarships.
Some of the greatest minds at the service of the U.S. ruling class--with the help of the young Carl Sagan, it turned out--also came up with a plan to steal back worldwide leadership in a hurry.
They would put a nuclear weapon on a rocket and launch it toward the moon. When it struck, it would explode. That would scare the Russians and win back U.S. leadership.
Long suppressed, news about this wild plan was finally revealed by physicist Leonard Reiffel, the director of the project and later NASA deputy director during the Apollo program, in a letter in the May 4 issue of the scientific journal Nature.
Approved by the hard-nosed generals of the U.S. Air Force, the plan won support from many in the Eisenhower administration. It was not just a wild idea of some Dr. Strangelove, the all-too-believable monster of the 1964 film of the same name. It was not just a contingency plan like thousands of others worked out in the back rooms of the Pentagon.
The ruling class's wild anti-communism had given this scheme a level of respectability that placed it close to operation.
Finally a few of the cooler-headed anti-communists realized that since the U.S. space program was in its infancy, rockets might well crash back on earth. This, they surmised, could be a problem.
That particular plan was shelved, but it gave way to giant hydrogen weapons, multi-warhead missiles, the 1962 missile crisis over Cuba. Later came Star Wars and other weapons systems just as dangerous for humanity--but greatly profitable for the military-industrial complex.
My physics instructor became a professor at Columbia University and a major spokesperson for the nuclear power industry. His career continued on its upward course until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
The Cuban Missile Crisis convinced me to give up any remaining ambition for a scientific career. Instead I joined Workers World Party. I thought the U.S. ruling class was reckless and dangerous and had to be fought.
And that was even before I learned they had planned to nuke the moon.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)HOME :: U.S. NEWS :: WORLD NEWS :: EDITORIALS :: SUBSCRIBE :: DONATE