Once again we dive into the archives from the incredibly prolific career of travel author/journalist Felix Runwald. Runwald’s work, unfortunately, has been uncollected, due to the fact that it would be nearly impossible to do so (it spans from the early twenties to today).

In this installment, I have selected Runwald’s New York Times Op/Ed piece that was written the day after the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon. Here Mr. Runwald expresses an opinion that was not frequently expressed in the late sixties, but one that seems no less crazy when reread today.

Up until last night I hated the moon and everything on it. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’ve always been a “moon booster.” A few years ago, in this very periodical, you may remember I suggested that we build some sort of device to destroy the moon. You will not hear me say such things any longer. I can now see the unparalleled possibilities that having an American on lunar soil brings.

Simply put: this changes everything. When a small boy looks at the sky, he no longer sees a black piece of paper with holes poked in it behind which God shines a flashlight; he sees his future playground. When a small girl looks at the sky she sees the site of her future kitchen. And when my wife looks at the sky she won’t notice me silently stepping out to the bar to meet up my secretary for drinks.

When the nuclear bomb was initially being tested, Los Almos director J. Robert Oppenheimer famously was reminded of a line from Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Those same portentous words jumped into my brain last night as my family and I sat huddled around the television set, watching astronaut Neil Armstrong’s comically oversized boot kick up a small cloud of dust on the moon.

With the Apollo 11 landing on the moon we see the first display of American dominance over space. With this simple, 16,00 kg container, our country is now one step closer to making Robert Oppenheimer and the Hindu equivalent of Jesus who wrote the Bhagavad Gita’s dreams a reality. An atomic bomb is great. I know it, and you know it. But could it destroy a world? Probably not.

But what if there was an America on the moon? This great land of ours would then be perfectly poised to destroy any world that we wanted. “But Felix,” I can literally hear you saying to this newspaper. “The quote said ‘worlds’ in the plural. If we destroy Earth we wouldn’t have completely fulfilled the sentiments behind it.”

You’re absolutely right. I don’t know if there is life on other planets, and quite frankly, I don’t care to find out. In order to become “destroyer of worlds” (my emphasis added without the permission of HinduJesus), America needs to man up and take out whatever worlds are available. Not because we want to, no. Because we must fulfill our destiny. Every man, woman and child in America held their breath in anticipation as they watched the Eagle module land on the surface of the moon last night.

Now it’s the rest of the world’s turn.

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Though the American public largely ignored Runwald’s position, in 1977 it became clear that one young American did take notice. Most film historians argue that the Death Star in George Lucas’ Star Wars film borrows heavily from the atomic powered moon imagined here by Mr Runwald. George Lucas has never acknowledged this reference.