What if... the Americans nuked the moon

If they nuke the moon, but it doesn't go off, surely this means NASA develops a US Space Navy and invades the moon 40 years later on charges of harbouring weapons of mass destruction?
 
It's hard to say. To deal with this, the Plowshare team proposed using "clean" nukes with low fission-fusion ratios, and burying the bombs deep enough that most of the fallout would be trapped by rock fallback.

Of course these nukes were not really clean. For a while there has been talk (and i wonder if they are trying to develop them) of Direct Fusion Bombs (H-bomb where you get fusion directly by using a strong conventional implosive instead of the old design where the implosive makes uranics fission which then provides the energy for fusion). If this kind of devices ever become real we will see a renewed discussion for using nukes for mega-engineering because they are (supposedly) much cleaner (no fissile products, no big neutron-activation).
 
Of course these nukes were not really clean. For a while there has been talk (and i wonder if they are trying to develop them) of Direct Fusion Bombs (H-bomb where you get fusion directly by using a strong conventional implosive instead of the old design where the implosive makes uranics fission which then provides the energy for fusion). If this kind of devices ever become real we will see a renewed discussion for using nukes for mega-engineering because they are (supposedly) much cleaner (no fissile products, no big neutron-activation).

Yeah, that's why I put "clean" in quotes. As far as I know, Teller's idea was more on the lines of a 1:20 fission-fusion ratio combined with a boron casing and better emplacement techniques, not an actual pure-fusion device. However, I haven't found any technical details of the "Ditchdigger" beyond that - I think they're still classified - so they may have been more ambitious than I realized.

Neutron activation, however, would still be an issue for fusion bombs - in fact, it may even be worse, because the energy yield per neutron emitted for D-T fusion is far less than for fission. Potentially that could be reduced by encasing the bomb in neutron-absorbing material, and it's a lot shorter-lived than fission products or transuranics, but it's still a problem unless you've got aneutronic fusion.
 
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