What If We Detonated a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon

So what would happen if we detonated an atom bomb on the moon? Not much according to scientsts. However it is very interesting to think about. Recently an asteroid colided with the moon, which caused a flash visible from earth. Certainly a nuclear detonation would be visible too. The US military actually considered detonating a nuclear device on the moon in the 50’s. A physicist who worked on the project said a single explosion would have been “microscopic,” with little impact. But what if the plans had been bigger, do we have enough nuclear weapons to push the moon out of orbit?

Not even close. Depending on where the detonation happened, sending the moon careening away from Earth would take somewhere between 10 billion and 10 trillion megatons of TNT. The most powerful nuclear device ever detonated, the Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba,” yielded the energy equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT. The current nuclear arsenal of the world could produce less than 7,000 megatons.