Bombing the Moon

So, I was watching the news (Fox News Channel, I'm sure) and they showed a few videos of people protesting, more or less, what NASA is going to do soon...bombing the moon.

I don't know what the problem is with these uneducated nimcompoops. NASA isn't sending any expolsives, especially not a nuclear bomb, to the moon. What they are sending could be called (and, I'm sure has been, because I read about it in a novel) a kinetic energy weapon, much like a meteor striking the surface of the Moon. (That's about as natural as you can get.)

The idea of kinetic energy weapons (as applied to Earth) go back at least as far as the 1950s and Jerry Pournelle: Project Thor. They have also been given the name of "Rods from God."

Think of a telephone pole sized rod of tungsten, or some other equally heavy material, plummeting through Earth's atmosphere at 36,000 miles per hour. When it struck the Earth it would create an atomic bomb sized explosion, but without the nuclear fallout and radiation.

Of course, Robert Heilein wrote about this when, in one of his novels, he had the moon colony people, who wanted their independence from Earth, threatening to use computer aided catapults to throw large boulders at specific target on the surface of the Earth.

There was anothe novel I read some years ago (science fiction, of course) about an alien race attacking Earth and doing the very same thing from orbit around the Earth. They had just gathered up some appropriate sized rocks from the asteroid belt.

The moon will be okay all you silly protesters out there. The purpose of the experiment is to see if spectrographic images of the impact and resultant explosion shows that there is any water below the Moon's surface...at least sufficient water for a Moon based colony.

As for Earth-targeted kinetic energy weapons, well, I would like them a whole lot more than nuclear bombs and all the radiation and fallout problems associate with them. But then, I don't like war or warfare because it tends to be harmful to children and other living things. Of course, one should have the right to defend one's self, shouldn't one? Better KEWs than nuclear weapons.