Project A119

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Project A119, or "A Study of Lunar Research Flights" was a 1950s top-secret plan developed by the United States Air Force with the intention of dropping an atomic bomb on the Moon. It is presumed that the purpose of such an action would be to display U.S. superiority to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world during the Cold War. The plans were never carried out, possibly because landing on the moon would be more acceptable to the American public.

The A119 project is allegedly classified. The sole source for information on the nature of project comes from a retired NASA executive, Dr Leonard Reiffel, who claimed to have fronted the project in the late 1950s at the US military-backed Armour Research Foundation.

Dr. David Lowry, a British nuclear historian, commented: “It is obscene. To think that the first contact human beings would have had with another world would have been to explode a nuclear bomb. Had they gone ahead, we would never have had the romantic image of Neil Armstrong taking ‘one giant leap for mankind.’”