A former U.S. Defense program has brought up the idea of nuking the moon to reach its center in search of lightweight metals.
The Defense Program in the spotlight is the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was secretively functional between 2007 and 2012.
After the existence of AATIP came to knowledge, The Vice filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn more about the program. After four years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has now released over 1,600 pages of documents. The documents revealed that the AATIP was given a $10 million purse in its first year to work on “advanced technologies”.
An initial assessment of these documents shows that the program studied whether wormholes could be traversed, high-frequency gravitational waves for communication purposes, antigravity devices, negative energy, warp drives, and manipulation of dimensions.
Among the documents released to The Vice are dozens of Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) that discuss the viability of these concepts.
The DIRD report on invisibility cloaking highlights that “perfect cloaking devices are impossible because they require materials where the speed of light approaches infinity”, said Science Alert.
The search for the best of materials would have taken AATIP projects to the moon as well, looking for materials that were as strong as steel but over 100,000 times lighter. The authors suggested that such extremely lightweight metals would probably be present at the center of the moon and the way to reach them would be to tunnel through the lunar crust and mantle. The authors recommended the use of thermonuclear explosives to get the job done.
The documents have been revealed publicly here.