What if China militarized the moon?

[theend3r]

Placing rockets on the Moon isn't the brightest idea but what about a laser? Nothing could come close to it and the strikes would be immediate.

[Albert VDS]

But the beam would be spread out, like when you move away from a wall while shining a flashlight at it.

The spot on the wall will get bigger and bigger while the area gets dimmer and dimmer.

So if you shine a deadly laser at the Earth it would be spread out over a large fraction and thus making it not deadly.

Now you would need an unimaginable amount of energy to make it deadly at that distance, but you wont have an accurate city toaster, more like a continent toaster.

[Stargate525]

But the beam would be spread out, like when you move away from a wall while shining a flashlight at it.

The spot on the wall will get bigger and bigger while the area gets dimmer and dimmer.

So if you shine a deadly laser at the Earth it would be spread out over a large fraction and thus making it not deadly.

Now you would need an unimaginable amount of energy to make it deadly at that distance, but you wont have an accurate city toaster, more like a continent toaster.

Lasers don't spread like typical light. It is indeed possible to get that narrow of a focus.

[Albert VDS]

Lasers beams are made out of photons, and photons(like any other subatomic partical) cannot have a momentum of zero in any direction due to Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Thus they cannot travel in a straight line. You might think that they do, but the bigger the distance the larger the divergence.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Albert VDS

[Kryten]

Lasers don't spread like typical light. It is indeed possible to get that narrow of a focus.

Lasers might not follow the inverse-square law, but they still disperse due to optical divergence and diffraction.

[theend3r]

You could always refocus it with a few satellites...

[lodestar]

You could always refocus it with a few satellites...

And the satellite could be easily shot down, not only defeating the whole purpose of putting the laser on the moon, but also getting George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in serious trouble...

[Albert VDS]

Lets say you can magically keep all the energy in the beam, then you still would need more than a few hundred satellites to keep the beam at deadly levels.

Then there's the fact that the Moon doesn't see all of Earth's surface at once, you'll have to wait till the right spot comes in view.

Not to mention the alignment of the satellites, which makes it an even more impossible task.

[Rhidian]

Rather than putting missile launchers on the moon, what if a country threatened to blow up the moon itself? It would be much easier to do provided they had enough firepower. If they don't even bother with the threatening, the apparent lack of target when the missile is launched towards space would give enough time to prevent the attack from being interrupted.

[Kryten]

Rather than putting missile launchers on the moon, what if a country threatened to blow up the moon itself? It would be much easier to do provided they had enough firepower.

That's a very big 'provided' there, to put it mildly.

[TheGatesofLogic]

That's a very big 'provided' there, to put it mildly.

How so? We all know the moon is made of cheese and if we launched a single Minuteman-III class ICBM with considerable extra stage propulsion for lunar injection with a full armament of 12 fully upgraded W87-class thermonuclear warheads each individually boasting payloads of approximately 475 kilotons of TNT (a total payload of 5.7 Megatons of TNT) I'm PRETTY SURE we'll be able to melt the damn thing....

[palioxis1248]

How so? We all know the moon is made of cheese and if we launched a single Minuteman-III class ICBM with considerable extra stage propulsion for lunar injection with a full armament of 12 fully upgraded W87-class thermonuclear warheads each individually boasting payloads of approximately 475 kilotons of TNT (a total payload of 5.7 Megatons of TNT) I'm PRETTY SURE we'll be able to melt the damn thing....

Ignoring the bit about cheese, melting the Moon requires a nontrivial expenditure of energy, like say, all the energy Earth receives from the Sun over a few years or something like that. Nukes don't come close to the amount of energy needed to do that, even with the size of our current global stockpile.

Besides, that's not destroying it. Unless you provide enough energy to completely overcome the Moon's gravitational binding energy, which requires yet another nontrivial expenditure of energy, all you are doing is reforming the internal structure of the Moon and eliminating some of Mankind's most famous monuments.

[Duxwing]

If China started building a military base on the moon, then other nations might declare war. If no nations declared war, then a game of nuclear whack-a-mole might ensue.

-Duxwing

[Brotoro]

The Moon has be hit many times over with impacts totaling much much more than our entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. That's what all the craters and nice round maria are from. You aren't going to destroy it with nukes.

[jwenting]

How so? We all know the moon is made of cheese and if we launched a single Minuteman-III class ICBM with considerable extra stage propulsion for lunar injection with a full armament of 12 fully upgraded W87-class thermonuclear warheads each individually boasting payloads of approximately 475 kilotons of TNT (a total payload of 5.7 Megatons of TNT) I'm PRETTY SURE we'll be able to melt the damn thing....

never mind that a Minuteman only carries 3 warheads maximum.

[Seret]

Hey, if you're going to worry about China's military assets, it'd be far more logical to worry about those located here on Earth. You know, Earth, that place we all live? They can put anything they like on the moon as far as I'm concerned, it's of little consequence. The only point of taking the high ground is so that you can use it to control the low ground, and the moon is pretty poor for that.

But should we worry about increasing Chinese military power? South East Asian nations arguably should, but I don't think most folks have anything to worry about. Even you Americans shouldn't be overly concerned IMO, their navy isn't anywhere near capable of threatening yours, so Taiwan and Japan are still secure. They've got one smallish carrier, you guys have what 10 supercarriers? No competition.

Besides, China has no real incentive to start a major hot war. They're playing the long game, and know that peace serves their purposes far better than war. If the status quo continues they'll ascend to superpower status without having to fight anybody.

[Albert VDS]

The only way way you can militarize the Moon is you have 2 groups on it.

All the ideas of using it as a base to hit targets on the Earth is like using rockets to get a basketball from the west point of America to the East point and landing it the hoop.

[CalculusWarrior]

Militarizing the Moon is a fundamentally stupid idea, not only is it an incredibly visible target, the travel times are not well suited for any reasonably quick attacks. I can just imagine a hypothetical universe in which this is a reality:

"Look daddy! A shooting star!"

"Oh no honey, it's just another Chinese missile we shot down."

[magnemoe]

Militarizing the Moon is a fundamentally stupid idea, not only is it an incredibly visible target, the travel times are not well suited for any reasonably quick attacks. I can just imagine a hypothetical universe in which this is a reality:

"Look daddy! A shooting star!"

"Oh no honey, it's just another Chinese missile we shot down."

This, travel time from moon to earth is measured in days, you also have to factor in earth rotation in the targeting. You can probably aim pretty accurately but so can the defenders.

An military moon base only make sense to protect assets on Moon, it also make sense to extract resources like water for reaction mass, even rock for shielding and armor for stations and satellites.

[Aghanim]

I agreed. Making military base on the moon is just silly, because why? What is the advantage?

[Winter Man]

I dunno, militarising the moon could work as some kind of MAD. Even if China were completely neutralised in a preemptive first strike, ignoring the fact that the fallout from that many bombs would probably do it for them, they could still launch 'revenge' nukes at their aggressors. Low visibility, low radar profile MIRVs. You could never get them all.

[Kryten]

I dunno, militarising the moon could work as some kind of MAD. Even if China were completely neutralised in a preemptive first strike, ignoring the fact that the fallout from that many bombs would probably do it for them, they could still launch 'revenge' nukes at their aggressors. Low visibility, low radar profile MIRVs. You could never get them all.

You mean exactly like the ballistic missile submarine force they already have? Even silo-based missiles would have very good chance of surviving an all-out attack.

[Winter Man]

Exactly like that, yes, but with more survivability since by that point you likely have yourself a little self-sustaining moon colony.

[Roastduck]

Exactly like that, yes, but with more survivability since by that point you likely have yourself a little self-sustaining moon colony.

I think by the time anyone is capable of a self-sustaining moon colony, either nuclear weapons will be obsolete (more than they already are, at least), or we will have somehow eliminated the need for resource-driven wars.

[Seret]

self-sustaining moon colony.

Blimey, how far into the future are we staring in this crystal ball? Self-sustaining off world colonies are waaaaaaaaay into the future.