Lunacy

The breaking news of last week was the revelation, after 45 years of being locked away in secret dossiers , that the US Air Force had, in the 1950's considered launching and exploding an atom bomb on the moon.

The period was at the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR and both ideologies were determined to outdo the other in the quest for space, as a metaphor for their political posturing, and ultimate domination of it for military supremacy.

There was considerable hysteria and a culture of reckless propaganda based mis-information on both sides.

This was not helped, in the eyes and ego of the US, by the pioneering Sputnik launches of the Soviets and their crowning glory ,as hindsight shows, of the Gagarin space walk in 1961.

This rather ironic materialistic victory of communism over capitalism was very damaging and it was game on with just about anything worthy of consideration. It was time for the Cold War muscle of both superpowers to be flexed and with much gesturing and points scoring to be had.

The US approach was to stir up a sinister scenario around the involvement of the USSR in space and this took the form of a co-ordinated and syndicated press campaign. It was widely reported, in column fillers of local and regional newpapers in America and on a world wide circulation , that to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Red Revolution there were plans by the Politburo to detonate a nuclear device on the dark side of the moon. This was intended to raise a large flash and subsequent dust cloud, to be clearly visible from the Earth and publicised as a sign of Soviet power and virility.

To some extent this feeding of selective information to the wary and fearful citizens of the US served to deflect attention away from the very same intentions of the American military.

The document, brought into the public domain recently, was innocently entitled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights'.

On a mundane level and fantasy aside the whole idea of an atomic explosion on the moon was not in fact borne out of spite to deny the Soviets of further publicity coups but for scientific observation of dust cloud patterns and overall scientific curiosity.

To a large extent the Apollo 11 moon landing and subsequent missions established NASA in the forefront of space exploration and technological spin offs and left the USSR looking a bit amateur and at firework status.

The release of the 'blow up the moon' files has unfortunately been blown out of all proportion for the benefit of TV topical news , sensationalist and entertainment ratings. The futility of a sole missile launch at a very dense rock some 238,000 miles away has not been part of the logical analysis of yet another in a series of Cold War myths and plain nonsense.

The hare-brained proposals appear to have been withdrawn on the grounds that there was some concern over implications for affecting the trajectory of the moon (was this a source of the main story line for the 1970's TV series of Space 1999?) or that a missile launch would just slingshot around the dark side and catapult back to planet earth. Such excuses could just be another convenient exit strategy for the actual lack of technology or budgetary constraints at the time.

Personally, I like to think that a high level delegation of The Clangers were able to persuade the US against an act of aggression and war on them as sole inhabitants and custodians of the Moon. The Americans made them whistle for it.