If the scientists raised the same concerns about human risks as the military did the AP and Daily Mail wrote their respectivee articles poorly, since neither suggests that. You are a journalist; how hard would it have been to say something like "scientists and military leaders feared a launch failure would endanger people on Earth, and the former also feared the effects of fallout on the lunar surface"? Their wording was admittedly ambiguous, but gives the impression the generals feared the project might kill people, while the scientists merely worried it could mess up their lab.


He was very much a proponent of nuking Mars to terraform it (pretty much the only one, IIRC.) Presumably, if he thought unleashing the entire US and USSR nuclear arsenal on Mars would leave it fit for human habitation, the literal fallout from dropping a single A-bomb on the Moon probably did not bother him much either. It may not have been Sagans idea, but if not he probably wished it were (it certainly seemed to give him ample inspiration a generation later.)