Studied potential of a lunar nuclear bomb

LEONARD REIFFEL | Sept. 30, 1927 - April 15, 2017

Leonard Reiffel’s many achievements as a physicist included two entirely unrelated things — one a downto-earth development that changed sportscasting and another a far-fetched idea that, had it happened, might have changed the course of history.

In sports broadcasting, Mr. Reiffel invented the Telestrator, which allows announcers to draw lines and circles on a television screen to show how a play developed.

But even more compelling was his role in a top-secret study for the Air Force that asked a simple question:

How about blowing up a nuclear bomb on or near the moon and seeing what happens?

Mr. Reiffel, who later helped NASA identify touchdown sites on the moon for the Apollo lunar module, died on April 15 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 89. Romayne Rickhoff, Mr. Reiffel’s longtime assistant, said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.

Soon after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit in 1957, sending jitters throughout the United States that it was losing the space race, the Air Force posed the hypothetical question to a group of scientists, Mr. Reiffel among them.

Project A119, as the study was called, secretly examined the scientific and military benefits of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear bomb the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima and detonating it on or near the surface of the moon. Whether that was even possible in the late 1950s is highly questionable.

A lunar detonation, the study said, would serve military goals by supplying information about the “detection of nuclear device testing in space and concerning the capability of nuclear weapons for space warfare.”

The plan was never executed and the moon survived, intact, to host six Apollo moon landings.

Mr. Reiffel (it’s pronounced like rifle) was an inventor with dozens of patents, but the Telestrator resonated the most.

For broadcaster John Madden, the device was transformative, greatly enhancing his ability to describe what the 22 men on the football field were doing, especially the linemen battling at the line of scrimmage during a running play. As a former coach, Mr. Madden used the Telestrator at CBS Sports, then at other networks, to let viewers in on the sort of explanations he had given to his players.

Mr. Reiffel’s forays into television, including one as the host of a local children’s science show in Chicago, had inspired the Telestrator. He had grown frustrated with the limits of narrative voice-overs to describe what was being shown onscreen.

The earliest version let Mr. Reiffel draw with a stylus on a transparent plastic sheet that was placed over a TV screen. It was coated so that electric currents could run over it. An image combiner merged the signals from the camera and pens.

The device was first used successfully with weather reports, prompting Mr. Reiffel to approach the CBS station in Chicago about expanding its use into sports. The CBS network eventually embraced it for NFL games.

Mr. Madden first used it during the playoffs after the 1981 season and Super Bowl XVI. In 2005, Mr. Reiffel won an Emmy Award in engineering for the invention.

Leonard Reiffel was born in Chicago on Sept. 30, 1927. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. His doctorate from the same school was in electrical engineering and physics.