Early in the Space Race, before the formation of NASA and even when the new organization was getting off the ground, the U.S. military took the lead on rocket development and space exploration. The Army, Air Force and Navy all had their own individual projects and studies. And the Air Force once proposed creating a weapons system on the Moon with the express purpose of bombing Earth.
Task & Purpose has previously dived into the ambitious Space Race plans for militarizing the Moon. The launch of Sputnik and the simmering Cold War arms race had both the Soviet Union and the United States looking for ways to get the upper hand in ballistic missile technology, satellite deployment and general public relations and perception. That included the possibility of going to the Moon, even before President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to do so by the end of the 1960s.
Ideas were ambitious and imagined the United States being able to reach the Moon and build on it far quicker than what actually happened. The Army had one of the most detailed proposals; the Project Horizon study looked at potentially building a lunar base that would be defended by space guns and Davy Crockett portable nuclear weapons. It later studied how soldiers could potentially dual wield space pistols for lunar gunfights. The Air Force also got in on the action, with a 1960 paper from the Ballistic Missile Division’s Directorate of Space Planning and Analysis titled “Military Lunar Base Program or S.R. 183 Lunar Observatory Study” outlining plans for a lunar base.
The paper is dedicated mainly to the timeline and steps needed to build a Moon base. It called for starting immediately for “maximum military advantage” and setting up a lunar base by 1969 following a multi-phase launch and installation operation. But the paper mentions a “Lunar Based Earth Bombardment System” multiple times, one that could be accurate between two to five nautical miles.
Exactly what that system would be isn’t made clear in the Air Force paper. The only specificity is the accuracy, the other references focus on when it could be installed. Given that strike radius, the potential weapons were likely nuclear rather than conventional as the military at the time was not looking at orbiting kinetic impact strikes. The weapons proposal is much larger in scale than the Army laid out in its lunar plans, focused mostly on defending the base. This system, depending on how much guidance it would have, could potentially hit any target on Earth.
A lunar base with an offensive purpose wasn’t just a passing thought. In January 1958, U.S. Air force Brig. Gen Homer Boushey gave a speech where he said that “the Moon provides a retaliation base of unequaled advantage.”
“If we had a base on the Moon, the Soviets must launch an overwhelming nuclear attack toward the Moon from Russia two to two-and-one-half days prior to attacking the continental U.S. first, only and inevitably to receive, from the Moon — some 48 hours later — sure and massive destruction,” he said.
This was the late 1950s and early 1960s. This wasn’t that unusual. The Cold War arms race The Navy was firing off nuclear warheads into the atmosphere to create radioactive death clouds that could potentially shut off the Soviets’ launch capabilities. Soldiers marched towards nuclear explosions as an experiment and the military even created nuclear air-to-air missiles. It wasn’t quite “anything goes” but a lot of ideas at least reached the research stage.
Notably, although the offensive capability was singled out from the start, the Air Force wrote that the final decision to deploy a Lunar Based Earth Bombardment System could be “safely deterred for three to four years” while the base construction was prioritized.
The Air Force study noted that “the base should be designed as a permanent installation, it should be underground, it should strive to be completely self-supporting, and it should provide
suitable accommodations to support extended tours of duty.” Space personnel on the base, designed for a crew of 21, would last between seven and nine months, in part due to “better living conditions.”
Of course, neither the Air Force nor the Army set up a military base on the Moon, let alone one that could carry out pinpoint orbital strikes on terrestrial targets. The Air Force continued its lunar studies, including publishing a 1961 “Lunar Expedition Plan.” The “Lunex” project proposed a crewed rocket launch to an underground base, but that was abandoned. Eventually NASA astronauts would reach the Moon in 1969, but they did not build a base.
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