So there was a story making the rounds last week about an alleged plot hatched by the United States in the 1950s to blow up the moon with a nuclear explosion.

Well, perhaps the goal wasn’t to completely destroy the moon, but rather to detonate an atomic bomb on the surface of the moon that would create a large mushroom cloud visible from Earth in an effort to intimidate the Soviets.

It was the 1950s, and the Soviet Union has just launched Sputnik, the world’s first orbiting satellite. The launch immediately put the United States behind in the space race, and the Air Force was anxious to put on a show that would cause the Soviets to cower in fear.

The plan was to launch a missile carrying an atom bomb, send it hurdling 250,000 miles into space, and exploding it on impact on the moon’s surface.

Scientists even planned to aim the missile at the border of the part of the moon visible from Earth. That way, it was presumed, the mushroom cloud would be visible to the Soviets.

The plan was ultimately scrapped because (a) scientists didn’t want to contaminate the moon with radioactive substances in case the U.S. ever decided to send humans there, (b) scientists were worried the explosion would have a negative impact on planet Earth, especially if the missile failed and (c) scientists finally realized that most Americans would think it was, you know, insane to blow up the moon.

I have no doubt that during the Cold War, the U.S. government and military were full of bomb-‘em-back-to-the-Stone-Age types who didn’t want to take any chances with the Soviet Union.

But this plan just seems so far fetched. The story I read said that, scientifically, the U.S. had the technology to carry out the mission if it had chosen to do so and probably could have hit its target with reasonable accuracy — despite the quarter million miles of distance.

Still it seems like something out of “Dr. No” or “Dr. Strangelove.”

Or even Saturday morning cartoons.

Remember Marvin the Martian? He was the Warner Bros. cartoon character who always wanted to blow up the Earth, but his plans were constantly foiled by Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck.

“Eh, Doc, why do youse wanna blow up the Earth?” Bugs would ask.

“It obstructs my view of Venus,” Marvin would reply.

In several cartoons, Marvin aimed a device he called the “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” at the Earth in an attempt to blow it up. But just at the last moment, Bugs would step in and save the planet.

“Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!” Marvin would always say.

I don’t know why I thought of Marvin the Martian when I read about the moon plot. I guess it’s because Marvin’s plans to blow up the Earth were about on par with the Air Force’s plan to attack the moon.

A better way — the way we ultimately intimidated the Soviets — was to send a man to the moon, which we did by the end of the 1960s and something the Soviets still have never done.

I’ll admit, though, it’s fun to laugh at the lunacy of the Cold War and to ponder just how close we may have come to nuclear holocaust during those days.

But it’s sobering to consider that, if we were planning to blow up the moon 60 years ago, what must some government scientist be plotting today?

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch.