Well, tonight my brother e-mails me the text of a speech given in 2003 by one William J. Perry, the very man who signed the letter we received back from the Defense Department. Here, 26 years later, in a speech at Stanford University, he says this:
Let me tell you a story to try to give you a sense of how fearful we were in those days. Shortly after I started the job as Undersecretary of Defense in Research and Engineering, in 1977, I received a letter from an American citizen in which he stated what he thought the United States should do to counter Soviet conventional military superiority. The writer proposed that the U.S. build something that he called a “moon bomb.” The idea was quite simple; he spelled it out for us in detail. He said we should build a large rocket. The payload of the rocket would be a long strand of steel cable. One end of the cable would be attached to the Earth. Then the rocket would be launched in the direction of the moon, with the cable playing out behind it as it went toward the moon. When the rocket landed on the moon, a little robot would come out and attach the other end of the steel cable to the moon. So, we have this picture: here’s the moon and here’s the Earth, and we have this cable between them. Now, as the Earth rotated, it would pull the attached moon in toward it, and, in accordance with its design, do so in such a way that the moon would smash into the Soviet Union. This is true; I’m not making it up. My executive brought me the letter along with a critique written by one of the physicists on my staff, explaining that this whole idea was infeasible.I'm practically beside myself with amusement that this Perry -- who eventually served as Secretary of Defense under President Clinton -- would remember our letter and use it in a speech. :-)
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