Atomic bomb aftermath6/15/2023 They may have simply realised that landing on the Moon was the bigger prize. A British newsreel at the time was brutal: "THE VANGUARD FAILS…a big setback indeed…in the realm of prestige and propaganda." The inferno that consumed their Vanguard rocket was captured on film and shown around the world. It didn't help American nerves that Sputnik was launched on top of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile – albeit a modified one – nor that the US's own attempt to launch an "artificial moon" ended in a huge, fiery explosion. In 1957 they went one better, stealing a lead in the space race with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in orbit around the world. Three years later the Soviets shocked Washington by exploding their own. In 1952, the US had exploded the first hydrogen bomb. Political and popular opinion in the United States held that the Soviet Union was ahead in the growth of its nuclear arsenal, particularly in the development, and number, of nuclear bombers ("the bomber gap") and nuclear missiles ("the missile gap"). In the 1950s, it didn't look like America was winning the Cold War. Asked to "fast track" the project by senior officers in the Air Force, Reiffel produced many reports between May 1958 and January 1959 on the feasibility of the plan. Hydrogen bombs were vastly more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the latest in nuclear weapon design at the time. Project A119, as it was known, was a top-secret proposal to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. He worked with Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor who is known as the "architect of the nuclear bomb".
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