America Once Planned to Nuke the Moon
Angry Planet31 Mai 2019

America Once Planned to Nuke the Moon

The Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space in 1957. By 1958, thanks in part to the work of famed scientist Carl Sagan, the Pentagon had a plan to show the commies what for by nuking the moon. Thankfully, it was just a plan. One that the U.S. never acted on. But it’s far from the only military scheme the US and others cooked up over the years. From bat bombs to an aircraft carrier built from an iceberg, military history is full of outlandish and ridiculous schemes best left abandoned at the planning stages.


Here to help us untangle these James Bond sounding plots is Vince Houghton. Houghton is a U.S. Army vet who served in the Balkans. Now, he is the historian and curator at the international Spy Museum in Washington D.C. He collected the wild schemes from America’s past in the new book Nuking the Moon and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board.


You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episoder(496)

Talking Turkey Ahead of the Vote

Talking Turkey Ahead of the Vote

There are authoritarians and there are tyrants, and sometimes they’re the same person. But would a true tyrant put himself up to face the people in an election that could be free and maybe even fair?W...

12 Mai 202345min

Teaser: Why UAPs Are So Hard to Talk About

Teaser: Why UAPs Are So Hard to Talk About

It’s a subscriber only episode of Angry Planet where we sit down with drone and UAP journalist Kelsey Atherton to deliver on an old promise: making up for a balloon-related episode from February some ...

9 Mai 202320min

Why War Never Changes

Why War Never Changes

You may have noticed that we end our show with a snippet of the video game Fallout (my favorite). “War - war never changes.”What if that’s both true and not true? You have to love a dichotomy. Anyway,...

1 Mai 202345min

How a 21-Year-Old Edgelord Stole Pentagon Secrets

How a 21-Year-Old Edgelord Stole Pentagon Secrets

How is that a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman posted government secrets to a private Discord group for almost a year before anyone noticed? On today’s episode of Angry Planet, Bellingcat’s Aric Tol...

24 Apr 202354min

Why the West Loves 'ISIS Brides'

Why the West Loves 'ISIS Brides'

The Islamic State has largely fallen out of the western press with the weird exception of ISIS brides. And when we talk about the Islamic State, western press often ignores its broader crimes. The pli...

17 Apr 202352min

Reagan's Failed Attempt to Put Lasers in Space

Reagan's Failed Attempt to Put Lasers in Space

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan stood before the American public and promised to put lasers in space. The Strategic Defense Initiative was meant to be the ultimate bulwark against communist intercont...

5 Apr 202344min

Russia's Fascist Youth Groups

Russia's Fascist Youth Groups

Dictatorships of the last century had some famous youth groups. Hitler had his Youth, Lenin had his Young Pioneers, and Mussolini had his Opera Nazionale Balilla.Such groups once attracted huge follow...

29 Mar 202347min

The Drones Above Ukraine

The Drones Above Ukraine

You know, we wanted to talk about European (and especially German) views of the war in Ukraine today. And we still will. What’s an IRIS-T, for example. What’s up with those Leopard tanks? But then a R...

21 Mar 202346min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
forklart
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
aftenpodden-usa
popradet
i-retten
stopp-verden
det-store-bildet
fotballpodden-2
rss-gukild-johaug
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-ness
hanna-de-heldige
nokon-ma-ga
aftenbla-bla
bt-dokumentar-2
e24-podden
frokostshowet-pa-p5
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk