Fact #185
Strange but true
In 1958 the US Air Force commissioned a study on detonating a nuclear device on the Moon, mainly so the flash would be visible from Earth and would make a point.
It was called Project A119 and the paperwork stayed classified until 2000. A young Carl Sagan was on the team, calculating how the dust cloud would look. It was dropped, partly over the risk of failure and partly because someone noticed that contaminating the Moon before anyone had studied it would be an unusually irreversible mistake.
Source: Reiffel, A Study of Lunar Research Flights, Air Force Special Weapons Center (1959), declassified 2000 · checked Sep 2026