From what I could tell, the articles content does not support its headline about "blowing up" the moon: They intended a single A-bomb whose blast would be visible (or at least detectable) from Earth. It sounds like the planned deterrent was not "if you go to the Moon we will blow it up" but "we will blow up anyone you send to the Moon."


You know the physics better than I, but just increasing the Martian atmospheres oxygen ratio to Earths would mean increasing its oxygen content 150X if it kept every atom. That still would not be enough to prevent hypoxia though, because the Martian atmosphere is only a small fraction as dense as Earths (i.e. even if it were 100% oxygen it would have far less per liter at the surface than Earth does.) As for temperature, I must ask you to elaborate on why lower temperatures aid gas retention, as I would expect gas molecules to escape more easily as they gain heat (and thus energy.) As you say though, there is little difference in Kelvins between Martian and Terran temperature, and bombarding Mars with thermonuclear bombs could only raise its temperature.


Unless I badly misunderstood thermonuclear weapons, the amount and persistence of fallout depends greatly on the bomb. I admit I only studied the topic as a layman years ago, but IIRC "basic" H-bombs use a fission cores heat to initiate fusion in surrounding hydrogen, producing relatively little fallout since fission byproducts are at the heart of a fusion reaction that leaves little but very hot helium that soon leaves Earth. However, an additional exterior fission stage is a very different, much dirtier affair, because fusion sends high energy particles streaming through an outer layer that quickly fissions and scatters to the four winds, leaving a trail of fission fallout in its wake. So really huge bombs (which terraforming surely requires) would pretty much cover the whole Martian surface in persistent radioactive fallout.


Reasonable (though I would have expected a higher percentage of mechanics and metallurgists to join the military,) except that, once again, the senior career military officers were the ones saying, "um... this sounds kind of dangerous...." In other words, even the people who coined the dismissive euphemism "collateral damage" were concerned enough about it to kill the project, but the scientists' chief worry was evidently damaging something they had only begun studying.


That is a good point; one reason the thought of shooting nuclear waste into the sun (or just off-planet) appeals to me is that even in the relatively rare case of an accident the rocket would either wind up in the ocean or disintegrate in the upper atmosphere where the resulting terrestrial contamination would almost certainly be negligible. Generals whose familiarity with nukes came mainly from Bikini might have taken a very different view.