Based on the “Schlorbians again” strip of the Perry Bible Fellowship, would the permanent effects of a powerful warhead (or, if not, multiple impacts at the same spot) on the moons surface be visible from Earth? Could we conceivably draw a recognisable CND symbol or something?
There are two problems. One, an ICBM can’t deliver a warhead to the Moon. It doesn’t have the necessary energy. Two, a nuclear weapon would just melt or vaporize a small part of the Moon’s surface. It would take a ridiculous number of nuclear weapons to create a feature that was visible from the Earth.
I just finished reading “The Woman in Del Rey Crater” in the anthology Scatterbrain by Larry Niven, in which he implies that a future coroporation, lobbing nuclear waste capsules to a crater on the moon, achieves such accuracy that they can write things there. Niven’s a pretty hard core writer, so it’s not unbelievable. Besides, the idea’s been used a lot in SF. Niven’s clearly paying homage to Robert Heinlein, who in **The Man Who Sold the Moon[/B[ suggests that thinly-disguised verrsion of Coke and 7-up (“6+” in his book) might be persuaded to put advertising on the moon. Arthur C, Clarke had a similar idea about a scien tific experiment sabotaged to turn into an ad for a suggested Coca Cola in one of hias short stories. And Asimov didm, too, in “Buy Jupiter”. But only Niven, AFAIK, suggested doing it long-range by impactin things on the moon.
Heck, if we don’t watch out Chairface Chippendale mightput a “CHA” up there.
So they can get into space against Earth’s gravity but they then don’t do any more work, whereas getting all the way to the moon would require Saturn or Apollo sized delivery systems?
And, of course, we have what I’d call a ridiculous number. Taking things to extremes, if we launched all 20,000+ at the same spot, would the dot on the moon be resolvable with the naked eye?
There is the story that the USAF investigated detonating a nuclear weapon on the Moon for propaganda reasons in the late Fifties, with Carl Sagan being involved. While the main intention was supposedly that the explosion itself should be easily visible from Earth, the source for the story, Leonard Reiffel, also may have thought there might be significant permanent changes: “Although he believes the blast would have had little environmental impact on Earth, its crater may have ruined the face of the ‘man in the moon’.”
However, I doubt this paraphrasing by the journalist can be quite accurate. Using a big Fifties-style weapon exactly right might give you a crater a mile or so across. That could be visible from Earth, but only with a telescope. What’s more likely to cause a big new feature is the ejected dust rather the crater.
There’s the additional complication that ideas about the nature of the lunar surface still weren’t definite in the period, so any predictions about permanent scarring would have had a large element of uncertainty.
An ICBM has enough energy to put a warhead in a suborbital trajectory, like the early manned Mercury missions. It goes up, it comes back down. It takes more energy to put something in Earth orbit, and yet more energy to escape the Earth.
6900 m/s Orbital Velocity (Earth)
11100 m/s Escape Velocity (Earth)
Nature used to have a column called Daedalus where the author used to come up with semi-humorous suggestions for new inventions. One column he wrote was about a spacecraft that would orbit the earth and burn magnesium as rocket fuel, producing as exhaust solid magnesium oxide, which is one of the whitest substances there is. He claimed that the rocket exhaust could be aimed ballistically at the moon with enough accuracy to paint ads that could be visible from earth (because the MgO would be so much brighter than the lunar soil that it would really stand out). Eventually he hoped to paint the whole near side of the moon bright white so that moonlight would be brighter on earth, and we’d use less electricity, or something silly like that. Like I said, it was meant as humor, and sometimes the “inventions” were a lot harder to poke holes in than this one.
Okay, but let’s not nitpick the OP’s casual mix-up of ICBMs with their less-specialized brethren. Well, okay, let’s assume the nitpicking accomplished heretofore has had its desired effect. Let’s use the biggest commercially-available heavy lift rocket, and place a MIRVed “combat section” from an ICBM on the front. 10 reentry vehicles, minus their heat-shielding (since they won’t need it where they’re going).
Let’s say we use 10, and draw an equilateral triangle (four rows: 4-3-2-1) on the moon so that the edges of the craters blur together. If we keep plopping similar equilateral triangles down, and assume we have convinced the former Soviet Union to convert all of its MIRVed ICBM front-sections into moon-crayons…
how many such deliveries would it take to draw a feature that was visible to the naked eye?