What Would Happen If We Dropped a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon?

Nuclear weapons are absolutely terrible; nevertheless, every hypothetical exercise involving them has a fascinating side. We’ve previously explored the first steps to survive a nuclear attack and the devastating effects of exploding one over a modern city. In another of their excellent videos, the people at Kurzgesagt propose aiming a little higher… and detonating a bomb on the Moon.

The Moon was one of the primary targets of the superpowers during the Cold War, and beyond the extraordinary race to reach it, both forces were very interested in its military potential. In 1959, the so-called “Project Horizon” of the United States Army explored the possibility of installing a permanent scientific-military base on the Moon, while the Air Force prepared a work called the “Lunar Research Flight Study”, which considered the possibility of atomic detonations near our satellite.

That’s right: nuclear bombs on the Moon. Atmospheric, surface, and underground tests multiplied over the years, but the crazy idea of dropping a nuclear bomb on the Moon never fully disappeared. That brings us once again to Kurzgesagt, “the” YouTube channel par excellence for analyzing strange nuclear exercises.

Detonating a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon

The mission is direct and blunt: a 100-megaton bomb, equivalent to twice the Tsar Bomba, explodes very close to the lunar surface. The video includes the exact detonation process for a thermonuclear device, starting with the compression of the radioactive metal core until it crosses its critical mass threshold, followed by the second phase of nuclear fusion. All this happens in just ten milliseconds, and the bomb transforms into one of the hottest objects in the Universe.

However, the development of the explosion takes a very different path from what we remember in terrestrial tests for one reason: from a practical standpoint, the Moon has no atmosphere. The heat and X-rays emitted by the gigantic fireball would burn everything in their path on Earth, but the absence of oxygen and the composition of the lunar surface (silicate rocks and metals reduced to dust by the hostility of space) change the configuration of destruction. A thin surface layer is vaporized, and everything trapped in the fireball is turned into glass.

Another fundamental detail is that the nuclear bomb detonated on the Moon has no shockwave. Its effect on Earth is devastating from any angle, but on the Moon, the fireball keeps growing. As if that were not enough, the ionizing radiation emitted by the bomb faces no difficulty, and anyone close enough will be poisoned. In parallel, about 10 percent of the bomb’s energy is transferred to the Moon, initiating a massive “lunamoto”.

Another Form of Radioactive Fallout

An explosion of this nature has the capacity to displace about 100 million cubic meters of material, and create a crater with a diameter of one kilometer. Debris is launched in all directions, and without the effects of an atmosphere to stop it, the micro-meteorites become a rain of destruction for a large part of our space infrastructure.

The most disturbing part? The entire process takes just a few seconds. The fireball cools and loses intensity rapidly until it disappears. Seen from Earth, it would be nothing more than a glow. On the Moon, the story is very different. All material that falls back to its surface will be radioactive, and the worst of the contamination will last about a year. The only good news is that there will be no changes in the Moon’s orbit. We need a lot, but a lot more energy to do that…