In the fall of 1957, a beach-ball-sized Soviet satellite called Sputnik started beeping its way around the planet, and the United States more or less lost its composure. Somewhere inside the Pentagon, in the scramble that followed, a genuinely strange idea took root: what if the U.S. answered Sputnik by blowing up a nuclear bomb on the Moon?
It sounds like the kind of thing a bored screenwriter would invent. It wasn't. The plan was real, it had a file number, and it stayed buried in classified archives for more than four decades before anyone outside the program ever heard its name: Project A119.
