THE POLICE AREN'T LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO PROTECT YOU

Without even thinking about it, we take it as a given that the police must protect each of us.That's their whole reason for existence, right?

While this might be true in a few jurisdictions in the US and Canada, it is actually the exception,not the rule. In general, court decisions and state laws have held that cops don't have to do athing to help you when you're in danger.

In the only book devoted exclusively to the subject, Dial 911 and Die, attorney Richard W.Stevens writes:
It was the most shocking thing I learned in law school. I was studying Torts in my first year at the University of San Diego School of Law, when I came upon the case of Hartzler v. City of San Jose. In that case I discovered the secret truth: the government owes no duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. Not only did the California courts hold to that rule,  the California legislature had enacted a statute to make sure the courts couldn't change the rule.

  But this doesn't apply to just the wild, upside down world of Kalifornia. Stevens cites laws an cases for every state — plus Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Canada -which reveal the same thing. If the police fail to protect you, even through sheer incompetence and negligence, don't expect that you or your next of kin will be able to sue.

Even in the nation's heartland, in bucolic Iowa, you can't depend on 911. In 1987, two men brokeinto a family's home, tied up the parents, slit the mother's throat, raped the 16-year-old daughter, and drove off with the 12-year old daughter (whom they later murdered). The emergencydispatcher couldn't be bothered with immediately sending police to chase thekidnappers/murders/rapists while the abducted little girl was still alive. First he had to take callsabout a parking violation downtown and a complaint about harassing phone calls. When he gotaround to the kidnapping, he didn't issue an all-points bulletin but instead told just one officer tocome back to the police station, not even mentioning that it was an emergency. Even moreblazing negligence ensued, but suffice it to say that when the remnants of the family sued the cityand the police, their case was summarily dismissed before going to trial. The state appeals courtupheld the decision, claiming that the authorities have no duty to protect individuals.

Similarly, people in various states have been unable to successfully sue over the followingsituations:

- when 911 systems have been shut down for maintenance

-when a known stalker kills someone

-when the police pull over but don't arrest a drunk driver who runs over someone later thatnight

-when a cop known to be violently unstable shoots a driver he pulled over for an inadequatemuffler

-when authorities know in advance of a plan to commit murder but do nothing to stop it

-when parole boards free violent psychotics, including child rapist-murderers

-when felons escape from prison and kill someone

-when houses burn down because the fire department didn't respond promptly1when children are beaten to death in foster homes

A minority of states do offer a tiny bit of hope. In eighteen states, citizens have successfully sued over failure to protect, but even here the grounds have been very narrow. Usually, the police and the victim must have had a prior "special relationship" (for example, the authorities must have promised protection to this specific individual in the past). And, not surprisingly,many of these states have issued contradictory court rulings, or a conflict exists between statelaw and the rulings of the courts.

Don't look to Constitution for help. "In its landmark decision of DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services," Stevens writes, "the US Supreme Court declared that the Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens from criminal harm."

 All in all, as Stevens says, you'd be much better off owning a gun and learning how to use it.Even in those cases where you could successfully sue, this victory comes only after years(sometimes more than a decade) of wrestling with the justice system and only after you've been gravely injured or your loved one has been snuffed.

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50 Things Youre Not Supposed To Know

Certain parties don't want you to know certain facts. For example, if Bayer were proud that it introduced heroin to the world, wouldn't that fact be on the company's Website? After all, it was one of the most popular drugs of the twentieth century. 

The official corporate history mentions the release of aspirin in 1899 but not heroin during the previous year.Do you think the Catholic Church wants you to know that Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book? True, the canonical Catholic Encyclopedia does mention the title in passing, but it demurelyneglects to say anything about it.

Historians don't seem too happy about the fact that Winston Churchill decried an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy, so you won't read that very often. Likewise, the cannibalistic tendencies of the Virginia colonists and our close call with World War III I are just too discomforting to be widely admitted.

My lady-love was an active feminist in the 1970s, yet she had never heard that the founding mothers of feminism opposed abortion. Small wonder, since their prolife views are almost never mentioned in biographies or documentaries. I was surprised when Richard Metzger,Disinformation's creative director, told me that Carl Sagan loved reefer. I guess the Drug Warriors won't be using the famous scientist as a poster child for the "evils" of pot.

The tobacco companies finally had to cop to lung cancer, but they still prefer that you remain ignorant of all the other health problems caused by smoking.You won't see "Causes blindness"or "Doubles risk of genital cancer" on the warning label. The beef industry sued Oprah Winfrey for discussing the possibility of mad cow disease in the US, so do you think that the dairy industry will be very happy when people find out that most milk starts out containing bovine leukemia virus?

Activists have been arrested for telling people about their full powers as jurors. Plans lo nuke the Moon have been classified. The military successfully pressured a movie studio to change the name of a character in the flick Black Hawk Down; that particular commando is currently in the stockade for raping a child under twelve.

Certain parties don't want you to know certain facts. That's a fact.

Contents

Introduction

01 The Ten Commandments We Always See Aren't the Ten Commandments

02 One of the Popes Wrote an Erotic Book

03 The CIA Commits Over 100,000 Serious Crimes Each Year

04 The First CIA Agent to Die in the Line of Duty Was Douglas Mackiernan

05 After 9/11, the Defense Department Wanted to Poison Afghanistan's Food Supply

06 The US Government Lies About the Number of Terrorism Convictions It Obtains

07 The US Is Planning to Provoke Terrorist Attacks

08 The US and Soviet Union Considered Detonating Nuclear Bombs on the Moon

09 Two Atomic Bombs Were Dropped on North Carolina

10 World War III Almost Started in 1995

11 The Korean War Never Ended

12 Agent Orange Was Used in Korea

13 Kent State Wasn't the Only — or Even the First — Massacre of College Students During theVietnam Era

14 Winston Churchill Believed in a Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy

15 The Auschwitz Tattoo Was Originally an IBM Code Number

16 Adolph Hitler's Blood Relatives Are Alive and Well in New York State

17 Around One Quarter of "Witches" Were Men

18 The Virginia Colonists Practiced Cannibalism

19 Many of the Pioneering Feminists Opposed Abortion

20 Black People Served in the Confederate Army

21 Electric Cars Have Been Around Since the 1880s

22 Juries Are Allowed to Judge the Law, Not Just the Facts

23 The Police Aren't Legally Obligated to Protect You

24 The Government Can Take Your House and Land, Then Sell Them to Private Corporations

25 The Supreme Court Has Ruled That You're Allowed to Ingest Any Drug, Especially If You're an Addict

26 The Age of Consent in Most of the US Is Not Eighteen

27 Most Scientists Don't Read All of the Articles They Cite

28 Louis Pasteur Suppressed Experiments That Didn't Support His Theories

29 The Creator of the GAIA Hypothesis Supports Nuclear Power

30 Genetically-Engineered Humans Have Already Been Born

31 The Insurance Industry Wants to Genetically Test All Policy Holders

32 Smoking Causes Problems Other Than Lung Cancer and Heart Disease

33 Herds of Milk-Producing Cows Are Rife With Bovine Leukemia Virus

34 Most Doctors Don't Know the Radiation Level of CAT Scans

35 Medication Errors Kill Thousands Each Year

36 Prescription Drugs Kill Over 100,000 Annually

37 Work Kills More People Than War

38 The Suicide Rate Is Highest Among the Elderly

39 For Low-Risk People, a Positive Result from an HIV Test Is Wrong Half the Time

40 DNA Matching Is Not Infallible

41 An FBI Expert Testified That Lie Detectors Are Worthless for Security Screening

42 The Bayer Company Made Heroin

43 LSD Has Been Used Successfully in Psychiatric Therapy

44 Carl Sagan Was an Avid Pot-Smoker

45 One of the Heroes of Black Hawk Down Is a Convicted Child Molester

46 The Auto Industry Says That SUV Drivers Are Selfish and Insecure

47 The Word "Squaw" Is Not a Derisive Term for the Vagina

48 You Can Mail Letters for Little or No Cost

49 Advertisers' Influence on the News Media Is Widespread

50 The World's Museums Contain Innumerable Fakes

01 The Ten Commandments We Always See Aren't the Ten Commandments

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WE ALWAYS SEE AREN'T THE TEN 
COMMANDMENTS 

First Amendment battles continue to rage across the US over the posting of the Ten
Command-ments in public places — courthouses, schools, parks, and pretty much anywhere else
you can imagine. Christians argue that they're a part of our Western heritage that should be
displayed as ubiquitously as traffic signs. Congressman Bob Barr hilariously suggested that the
Columbine massacre wouldn't have happened if the Ten Commandments (also called the
Decalogue) had been posted in the high school, and some government officials have directly,
purposely disobeyed court rulings against the display of these ten directives supposedly handed
down from on high.

Too bad they're all talking about the wrong rules. 
Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State
Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply
reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17.
You'll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing
or coveting, and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told
him on Mount Si'nai. These are not written down in any form.

Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two "tables of stone" with rules
written on them (Exodus 31:18). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he
sees the people worshipping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the
tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).

 In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to "commandments." In the first instance, they are
"words" which "God spake," while the tablets contain "testimony." It is only when Moses goes
back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28). In an
interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the
ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses' memory is faulty or God
changed his mind.

Thus, without further ado, we present to you the real "Ten Commandments" as handed down by
the LORD unto Moses (and plainly listed in Exodus 34:13-28). We eagerly await all the new
Decalogues, which will undoubtedly contain this correct version:

I. Thou shalt worship no other god.
II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
III.. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep
IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering at the year's end.
VI. Thrice In the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.
VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.
VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.
X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother's milk.

02 ONE OF THE POPES WROTE AN EROTIC BOOK

02 ONE OF THE POPES WROTE AN EROTIC BOOK 

Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and
rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn't
get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly
publication on literature claims that Historia "was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of
the whole Renaissance." The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: "The
Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German]
Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy]."
 It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the
turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book
appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste
Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye
Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic
Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted
below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in
modern English.)

 The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today's
standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres:
"When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was 
embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and 
wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was 
refreshed." Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged,
then ate, then drank wine.

His Holiness describes the next time they hook up: 
Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we
judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so
pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure....
Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he
saw such beauty as he had never seen before. "I have found more, I believe," said Euralius,
"than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or 
more fair than these limbs?... O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it 
you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my 
arms?... O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I 
am, or more blessed."...

He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren't weary. Like Athens,
who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.
 But Euralius isn't just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres' cousin-in-law:
You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No
heart of flesh hasn't sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise
Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature
of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with
nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in
our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And
many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when
love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against
the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.
Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres' husband
borrows a horse from Euralius: "He says to himself, 'If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the 
same thing to your wife.'" 
Popes just don't write books like that anymore!

03 THE CIA COMMITS OVER 100,000 SERIOUS CRIMES EACH YEAR

03 THE CIA COMMITS OVER 100,000 SERIOUS CRIMES EACH YEAR

It's no big secret that the Central Intelligence Agency breaks the law. But just how often its doesin is a shocker. A Congressional report reveals that the CIA's spooks "engage in highly illegal activities" at least 100,000 times each year (which breaks down to hundreds of crimes everyday). Mind you, we aren't talking about run-of-the-mill illegal activities — these are "high Iyillegal activities" that "break extremely serious laws."

In 1996, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a huge report entitled "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century." Buried amidhun-dreds of pages is a single, devastating paragraph:The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed ofthe government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to breakextremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticatedefforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred timesevery day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage inhighly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassmentto the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationalsand, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself.Amazingly, there is no explanation, no follow-up. The report simply drops this bombshell andmoves on as blithely as if it had just printed a grocery list. One of the world's foremost experts on the CIA — John Kelly, who uncovered this revelation —notes that this is "the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes."He goes on to say:The report suggested that the CIA's crimes include murder and that "the targets of the CS[Clandestine Service] are increasingly international and transnational and a global presence is increasingly crucial to attack those targets." In other words, we are not talkingabout simply stealing secrets. We are talking about the CIA committing crimes against humanity with de facto impunity and con-gressional sanctioning.Other government documents, including CIA reports, show that the CIA's crimes include terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. The documentsalso show that these crimes are part and parcel of deliberate CIA policy (the[congressional] report notes that CIA personnel are "directed" to commit crimes).

04 THE FIRST CIA AGENT TO DIE IN THE LINE OF DUTY WAS DOUGLASMACKIERNAN

04 THE FIRST CIA AGENT TO DIE IN THE LINE OF DUTY WAS DOUGLASMACKIERNAN

As of the year 2000, 69 CIA agents had died in the line of duty. Of these, the identities of 40remain classified. Former Washington Post and Time reporter Ted Gup spent three years hacking down information about these mysterious spooks who gave their lives for the Agency. (Mmresulting publication, The Book of Honor, names almost all of them.)

 The first to die was Douglas Mackiernan. Undercover as a State Department diplomat, the USArmy Air Corps Major worked in the capital of China's Xinjiang (Sinkiang) province, whichGup says "was widely regarded as the most remote and desolate consulate on earth." He went there in May 1947 to keep an eye on China's border with the Soviet Union and to monitor the Husskies' atomic tests.

 In late September 1949, during the Communist takeover of China, Mackiernan left, but it was toolate to use normal routes. Incredibly, he decided to go by foot during winter all the way to India,which would take him across a desert and the Himalayas. He, three White Russians, and a Fulbright scholar slogged the 1,000-mile trek in eight months. On April 29, 1950, they managedlo reach the border of Tibet, but guards there thought the men were commies or bandits, andopened fire on them.

 Hitting the ground, the bedraggled travelers waved a white flag, which stopped the gunfire. Theyslowly walked toward the border guards with their hands over their heads, but the Tibetans shotthem, killing Mackiernan and two of the Russians. To add insult to injury, the guards cut theheads off the corpses. Their remains are buried at that spot.

 With documents from the National Archives, Mackiernan's widow, and other sources, Guppulled the CIA's first casualty out of the classified shadows. To this day, the Agency refuses toacknow-ledge Mackiernan's existence.

05 AFTER 9/11, THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WANTED TO POISONAFGHANISTAN'S FOOD SUPPLY

05 AFTER 9/11, THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WANTED TO POISONAFGHANISTAN'S FOOD SUPPLY

 One of the strangest things the media do is to bury huge revelations deep in the bowels of alarger story. A perfect example occurs in "10 Days in September," an epic eight-day series thatran in the Washington Post. In part six, Bob Woodward and Dan Balz are recounting the Bush Administration's activities on September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks. Bush andNational Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have headed to the Pentagon to be briefed on action against Afghanistan by a two-star general from the Special Operation Command:

Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to thePentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared for Bush and got a big surprise.

One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box —Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United Statesdoesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would effectively be a chemical or biological attack — clearly banned by treaties that the UnitedStates had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Nice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of theUnited States," she said.

Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said.

Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slideand that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld.

06 THE US GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT THE NUMBER OF TERRORISMCONVICTIONS IT OBTAINS

06 THE US GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT THE NUMBER OF TERRORISMCONVICTIONS IT OBTAINS

 Naturally enough, the Justice Department likes to trumpet convictions of terrorists. Besidesgarnering great publicity and allowing the citizenry to sleep snugly at night, this means moremoney for the department. The problem is that the numbers are a sham.

The story broke when the Philadelphia Inquirer examined convictions that the Justice Department said involved terrorism during the five year-period ending September 30, 2001.They found ludicrous examples of misclassification:

In one vivid example, an assistant US attorney in San Francisco asked US District Judge Marilyn H. Patel on Monday to stiffen a sentence against an Arizona man who got drunkon a United Airlines flight from Shanghai, repeatedly rang the call button, demanded moreliquor, and put his hands on a flight attendant. Justice Department records show the caseas "domestic terrorism." In another case: "A tenant fighting eviction called his landlord, impersonated an FBI agent, andsaid the bureau did not want the tenant evicted. The landlord recognized the man's voice andcalled the real FBI."

Other "terrorist" incidents included prisoners rioting for better food, "the former court employeewho shoved and threatened a judge," and "[s]even Chinese sailors [who] were convicted oftaking over a Taiwanese fishing boat and sailing to the US territory of Guam, where they hopedto win political asylum."

After this chicanery was exposed, Republican Congressman Dan Burton asked the GeneralAccounting Office — a nonpartisan governmental unit that investigates matters for Congress —to look into the Justice Department's claims of terrorist convictions. Sure enough, the GAOreported that the situation isn't nearly as rosy as we've been told.

In the year after 9/11 — from September 30, 2001, to that date the following year — the JusticeDepartment maintained that 288 terrorists had been convicted in the US of their heinous crimes.But the GAO found that at least 132 of these cases (approximately 42 percent) had nothing to dowith terrorism. Because of the GAO's methodology, it didn't verify every one of the remaining 166 convictions, so it refers to their accuracy as "questionable."

The deception is even worse when you zoom in on the cases classified as "internationalterrorism," which are the most headline-grabbing of all. Out of 174 such convictions, 131 (anamazing 75 percent) weren't really about terror.

After all of this humiliation, the Justice Department must've cleaned up its act, right? That's whatit told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Well, the paper did a follow-up on "terrorism" cases for the first two months of 2003. Out of the 56 federal cases supposedly involving terrorism, at least 41 were bogus. Eight of them involved Puerto Ricans protesting the Navy's use of Vieques as a bombingrange. The prosecutor who handled these cases says she doesn't know why they were classifiedas terrorism. Similarly, 28 Latinos were arrested for working at airports with phony ID, and a spokes man for the US Attorney says they weren't even suspected of being involved in terrorism.The most ridiculous example: "A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader."

07 THE US IS PLANNING TO PROVOKE TERRORIST ATTACKS

07 THE US IS PLANNING TO PROVOKE TERRORIST ATTACKS

 Perhaps the government won't need to inflate its terrorism-arrest stats after it implements the Defense Science Board's recommendation. This influential committee inside the Pentagon has proposed a terrifying way to fight evil-doers: Goad them into making terrorist attacks. Yes, you read correctly. Instead of waiting for a plot to be hatched and possibly executed, go out and makeit happen.

 In summer 2002, the Defense Science Board outlined all kinds of ways to fight the war on terrorism around the world. The scariest suggestion involves the creation of a new 100-man,$100-million team called the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG.

This combination of elite special forces soldiers and intelligence agents will have "an entirely new capability to proactively, pre-emptively provoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups,"according to the DSB's report.Just how the P2OG will "provoke" terrorists into action is not specified, at least in the unclassified portions of the report.

United Press International — which apparently has access tothe full, classified version of the report — says that techniques could include "stealing theirmoney or tricking them with fake communications." The Moscow Times offers further possibilities, such as killing family members and infiltrating the groups with provocateurs, whowill suggest and even direct terrorist strikes.

Once the terrorists have been provoked, what then? UPI says that by taking action, the terrorists would be "exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces." In other words, the plan is to hit the hornet's nest with a stick, while waiting nearby with a can of bug spray. The flaws in this approach are obvious. Although not spelled out in the UPI article or the report itsef,the idea seems to be that the P2OG will cause terrorists to make an attack but supposedly stopthem light before the attack actually occurs. Will the P2OG always be able to prevent terrorism it creates from taking place? Will it always be able to "neutralize" all of the terrorists during that crucial window after a plan has been put into motion but before it's been carried out? I wouldn'twant to bet lives on it. But that's exactly what's happening.

Whenever any future terrorist attack occurs — an embassy is truck-bombed, a nightclub is blown to smithereens, prominent buildings are hit with hijacked passenger jets — we'll never be100 percent sure that this wasn't an operation the P2OG provoked but then was unable to stop intime.

08 THE US AND SOVIET UNION CONSIDERED DETONATING NUCLEAR BOMBS ONTHE MOON

08 THE US AND SOVIET UNION CONSIDERED DETONATING NUCLEAR BOMBS ONTHE MOON

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.

It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center spearheaded the project (labeled A119, "A Study of Lunar Research Flights").

The idea was to shock and awe the Soviet Union, and everybody else, with a massive display of American nuclear might. What better demonstration than an atomic explosion on our closest celestial neighbor? According to the project's reports, the flash would've been visible to the naked eye on Earth. (It's been suggested that another motivation may have been to use the Moonas a test range, thus avoiding the problems with irradiating our home planet.

 Carl Sagan was among the scientists lending his intellectual muscle to this hare-brained scheme.The project's leader was physicist Leonard Reiffel, who said: "I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Forcewere mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth."When a reporter for Reuters asked him what had happened to Project A119, Reiffel replied,"After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the world of classified activities."

Astoundingly, this wasn't the only time that a nuclear strike on the Moon was contemplated.Science reporter Keay Davidson reveals that "in 1956, W.W. Kellogg of RAND Corporation considered the possibility of launching an atomic bomb to the Moon." In 1957, NASA's JetPropulsion Laboratory put forth Project Red Socks, the first serious proposal to send space craftto the Moon. One of its lesser suggestions was to nuke the Moon in order to send lunar rockshurtling back to Earth, where they could be collected and studied. The following year, the leading American astronomer of the time, Gerard Kuiper, coauthored a memo which considered the scientific advantages of nuking the Moon. The creator of the hydrogen bomb, physicist Edward Teller, similarly mused about dropping atomic bombs on the Moon in order to study the seismic waves they would create.

The Soviet Union got in on the act, also in the late 1950s. Project E-4 would've used a probearmed with an A-bomb to blast the Moon, apparently as a display of one-upmanship. The idea reached the stage of a full-scale model but was aborted for fear of the probe falling back to Earth.