The Cold War was one of history’s craziest – and scariest – moments. Two paranoid superpowers spent each waking moment on the lookout for a surprise attack, with twitchy fingers hovering above buttons that could launch enough nuclear weapons to exterminate not only its rival, but all of humanity while at it. Fear inspired each to come up with plans to counter the other’s ability to wipe it out – and some of those plans were insane. None more so than the American plan to stop the planet from spinning as a counter to a Soviet nuclear attack. Below are some fascinating facts about that bonkers scheme.
The Plan to Stop the Earth’s Spin
Few Cold War ideas were more insane than stopping the Earth from spinning in order to foil a Soviet nuclear strike. To be fair, there was some method to the madness. Launching a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to strike a target thousands of miles away involves intricate calculations that include planetary rotation. Tinkering with Earth’s rotation would screw up those intricate calculations, and cause ballistic missiles to miss their targets. Thus was born PROJECT RETRO, an early 1960s research effort into what it would take to pause the planet’s spinning.
PROJECT RETRO was worthy of Wile E. Coyote in that, like many of his schemes, it actually works – in theory. Once launched, the Cold War’s early ballistic missiles could not be redirected. Because of Earth’s rotation, hitting something with a ballistic missile is like shooting an arrow at a moving target. In both cases, the shooter has to aim not at where the target is, but at where the target will be in the time it takes the missile or arrow to get there.
A Cartoonish Plan That Was Seriously Explored
If, for example, it takes an ICBM 30 minutes to fly from Russia to Washington, DC, the Russian won’t aim it at where Washington is at the time of launch. Instead, they will aim the missile at where Washington will be, because of the Earth’s rotation, in 30 minutes. However, if the target stops moving after a projectile is launched – be the projectile an arrow or a missile – the result will be a miss. So the United States Air Force floated the idea of using rocket engines – specifically “a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines” – to stop the planet’s spin.
In theory, such a crazy Looney Tunes plan could foil Soviet ICBMs. Accordingly, the Air Force set out to test the theory’s feasibility. In 1960, it tasked the RAND Corporation with evaluating the possibility of using giant stationary rocket engines to pause Earth’s rotation in case of nuclear attack. As seen below, while there was something to the theory, going from theory to practice was… problematic. As it turned out, the US Air Force’s spitball guesstimate of needing a thousand rocket engines to pause the Earth’s rotation was too low.
Stopping the Planet’s Spin to Foil Soviet Nukes Would Have Been a Cure Worse than the Disease
Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation planner, did the math and crunched the numbers to find out just what it would take to pause the Earth’s rotation. He concluded that would require not a thousand Atlas rockets, but “one million billion” of them. The propellant necessary would have been “500 times the mass of Earth’s atmosphere”. That was beyond even the Pentagon’s budget. And even if Pentagon could afford it, stopping the Earth’s spin would have been way worse than just letting all the Soviet nukes hit their targets.
Imagine a 30 minute ICBM flight time from Russia to Washington, DC, and a 20 minute warning that a Russian nuke is on its way. For the missile to miss Washington by 10 miles, the planet’s spin would have to be slowed by about 30 miles for 20 minutes. If that happened, every structure, grain of sand, drop of water, and living thing on Earth would experience that deceleration. The result would be massive tsunamis, shattering earthquakes, and super hurricanes – all beyond anything ever recorded in human history – wrecking Earth. A nuclear Armageddon would be mild compared to that.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Boing Boing – US Air Force Proposal: Pause the Earth’s Rotation So Nukes Would Miss Targets
History Halls – The Anarchy at Samarra: When Turkish Slave Soldiers Wrecked the Abbasid Caliphate
We Are the Mighty – America Wanted to Stop Earth’s Rotation During Cold War
