Non-sequitur: no, one nuclear device would not “blow up the moon”

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this today, as I really don’t have the time and have so many things I need to blog about that are actually important, but I couldn’t resist.  CBS Washington is reporting that the US looked at initiating a nuclear device on the moon as a demonstration against the Soviets during the early space race, describing it as “blowing up the moon:”

 Would Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even had a moon to walk on if the United States had its way in the 1950s? [Good Lord….]

During the height of the Cold War, U.S. officials debated whether to detonate nuclear bomb on the moon in order to send a message to the Soviet Union, the Asian News International reports.

The secret project dubbed, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” and nicknamed “Project A119,” was seriously being considered until it was scrapped because military officials were worried it would hurt the people on Earth.

The reason why this so annoys me, is that there are many people, millions of them, who in spite of history and reason believe that the initiation of one nuclear device would mean the destruction of the entire world.  Or, in this case, the moon. This is just sheer……lunacy.  I’m not sure what effect the military was worried about such an event having on the people of earth, as a surface burst would have raised a pretty good cloud of dust but I doubt any would have achieved escape velocity.  So, it would have just drifted around the moon for a while and then settled down.

This is not just an odd item.  Many of these same people who, in spite of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not ending the world, in spite of hundreds of above-ground nuclear tests in the 40s and 50s not ending the world, so fear anything “nuclear” that they are violently against nuclear power as they feel an accident would result in the devastation of the planet.  We can thank decades of environmentalist scare-mongering and general cultural ignorance and hyperbole for that – a major, very clean source of power with great scalability and few down-sides almost totally denied.  The level of ignorance is so great that a reporter for a major media outlet would actually question whether there would be “any moon left” after a missile warhead was initiated on the surface of the moon.  Please.

It also plays to the progressive ideology that man is so all-powerful, so existentially dominant that even relatively minor actions on our part can obliterate the universe.  It’s the same mentality that looks on Obama, the lowest of men, as their “lord and savior.”  Good grief.  Where do we even start, dealing with a culture so intentionally dumbed down as this one (for, dumber people are easier to manipulate and control)?

We start with prayer!  Then penance!