Somebody Get Richard Perle a Spacesuit

Given the Bush administration's fondness for failed Soviet initiatives, they may want to consider another one that has just come to light: putting a military base on the moon. From The Moscow News:

In the days of the Cold War Soviet commanders and their best scientists were working on a project to build military headquarters on the Moon, the Novaya Gazeta weekly reports. The paper writes that the lunar base project was developed thirty years ago and was only abolished because of its enormous cost. The newspaper cited Aleksandr Yegorov, deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (the name of the bureau suggests that it deals with top secret military projects — MosNews) as saying that he personally took part in the development of the lunar base project. Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it. ... The project was abolished only due to its enormous cost, Yegorov said. According to him, the Soviet project was “tens of times” more expensive than the Apollo project of the United States which cost $34 billion.

Well, cost has yet to prevent Bush from doing anything else, and occupying the moon would probably be a damn sight cheaper than occupying Iraq for the rest of eternity.