True. It is every little boy’s dream. It just taunts us night after night and sometimes even during the day. The sight of it makes me want to puke. Cecil himself even wrote a column about blowing it up.
Extremely simplistic answer. You vaporize a bunch of lunar stuff. You analyze the spectrum of light of all this glowing stuff. See signs of complex organics? Might be signs of life…
Forever contaminate the Moon? Huh??
Nukes here at home don’t forever contaminate the Earth. Sure, it’s probably unpleasantly warm in some spots of Nevada even to this day, but that’s a small, small plot of real estate, relatively speaking. The Moon is pretty big, bigger than Nevade, if you hadn’t noticed.
Also, and this is just a guess-- if you can survive in an airless, superhot/supercold environment wearing a space suit, you probably scoff at residual nuclear radiation.
The contamination has nothing do do with people.
It has to do with any sensitive scientific experiments which would have their results skewed because of residual radiation - due to a completely pointless showboating display.
BTW - steel made before 1945 is considered somewhat valuable, because all current steel is contaminated by radioactive isotopes.
To what extent?
I’m whooshed…fill me in.
A reference to “The Honeymooners”.
Jackie Gleasons’ character used space travel as a metaphor for wife beating. His wife was named Alice…
ETA…Gotta love ‘Futurama’
Enough to make it unsuitable for use in sensitive physics experiments.
Note the second paragraph: Operation Deadlight - Wikipedia
As a warning to Mars. Them little green bastards are always eyeballing our women.
How many sensitive physics experiments are conducted that one hundred submarines would be required? 
Just hanging up there, waving its ass at us… It needs to be taught a lesson.
Would a nuclear blast on the Moon’s surface still form a mushroom cloud, or is that only in Earth’s atmosphere? Would it be more spherical?
And what about a nuclear detonation, say, five miles above the lunar surface?
There is a lot of dust, less gravity, no atmosphere. I’d say more of a plume than a mushroom cloud, with material perhaps escaping to space.
This is a job for Chronos.
I suspect that it would be barely visible with the unaided eye.
Think about it - the moon is 2,000 miles across. Even the largest device made is going to have tiny fireball in the vacuum of the Moon’s surface. Say the fireball is (generously) 10 miles in diameter. That’s 1/200 of the diameter of the moon, which is only the size of a dime held at arms length. So, the explosion would probably look like a tiny “spark” (like a camera flash at a stadium). If you blinked when it happened, you’d miss it.
A 10 inch telescope is sufficient to videotape a meteor hitting the moon with the energy equivalent of 4 tons of TNT: here. With a brightness of magnitude 7, the event wasn’t much below visibility with the mark I eyeball.
A nuke, with energy release in the hundreds of kilotons range would likely be naked eye visible if it occured on the uniluminated limb of the moon.
Though weight considerations could be taken into account, the risk of a lunar lander crashing or otherwise failing would be too large. That is, if NASA would go through all the trouble of getting a nuclear device to the moon, they would not take a chance on using an absurdly complicated descent stage to set off a ground-level explosion. Can you imagine the publicity (cold war or otherwise) of a nuclear dud? Surely they’d nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Well played.
At the risk of missing a whoosh, the pre 1945 steel is still used in more mundane structural supports for low level radiation detectors, such as whole body monitors and very low level waste monitors. The emission spectra of some of the products found in the contaminated steel are annoyingly close to some of the emission spectra of some of the contaminants you might ingest/breath in if you work in a nuclear power plant or on low level waste. That and the raised background level across the spectrum due to compton scatter lowers the limit of detection for the devices, so you end up having to monitor things/people for longer, which is already tedious enough.