If We Can Put a Man on the Moon...

Why can't we blow it up?

I was recently asked this question: "If the whole world worked together, how long would it take us to blow up the Moon?" Well, the answer is obvious... more than a week.

Let's first assume we're talking about nukes here. And we're not talking about moving it out of its orbit and crashing it into the Sun, or drilling a big hole and using some sort of resonance sound wave to destabilize the core, or any other clever bullshit science fiction trick. No... we're talking about blowing that big white fucking orb in the sky to kingdom come.

OK.

First, the diameter of the Moon is approximately 3,474 Kilometers, or since I am in the U.S. and therefore irrationally opposed to the Metric System, we're looking at 2,159 Miles. One of the largest craters from a nuclear blast was about 106 ft. deep or .02 miles. This was caused by a 15 megaton bomb. We currently have about 30,000 warheads in the world. Most of which we couldn't convert to high yield bombs, but for the sake of argument, lets say we have access to 20,000. So with a little math here we can assume that with a nominal yield of 15 megatons it would take approximately 20,000 bombs just to make a hole 400 miles deep. We're not even close.

But hold on there just a damn minute... man. The Soviets created a 100 megaton bomb back in the 60's or 70's (40 years ago folks). And, at one point, they had amassed around 45,000 nukes and the U.S. had a paltry 30,000. Add some Chinese, French, English, Pakistani and hell, maybe even an Iranian nuke or two and we've got the proven ability to build upwards of 100,000 bombs at any given point. If we worked those centrifuges 24X7 I bet we could crank out 20,000 one hundred megaton nukes in no time.

That changes everything.

If one 15 megaton nuke blasts a hole .02 miles deep, then a 100 megaton nuke would likely make a hole 6.6 times deeper, or .132 miles deep. Multiply .132 times 20,000 nukes and we get one big fucking 2,640 mile-deep crater... which is, of course, about 600 miles deeper than we would need to blow a hole clean through that bad boy.

So how long would it take us, if everyone on the planet worked together to make this happen? Like I said, longer than a week. Maybe even a couple of months.