Even the non-geophysicists knew the plan had flaws, including endangering everyone on the planet.
The Cold War was a tense and dangerous period in human history, with the U.S. and U.S.S.R. vying for global dominance. In the midst of this standoff, the U.S. Air Force conceived a radical plan to stop Soviet missiles. However, this plan had the potential to destroy life on Earth, as reported by the Daily Mail.
The plan was first revealed by Daniel Ellsberg in his 2017 book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Known as “Project Retro,” the classified proposal involved using one thousand Atlas engines, the largest available, positioned horizontally to counteract the Earth's rotation. The goal was to cause Soviet missiles to overshoot their targets.
From the Air Force officials, the plan was passed on to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Ellsberg. "The officer originating this proposal envisioned that if our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars detected and reported on the huge viewing screens at NORAD a large flight of missile warheads coming across the North Pole from the Soviet Union – aimed at our missile fields in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Missouri – the array of Atlas engines would be fired, as near simultaneously as possible, to stop the Earth’s rotation momentarily," Ellsberg wrote, as per the Daily Grail.
Ellsberg was working as a strategic analyst at the RAND (research and development) Corporation during this time. When he received the proposal, he was baffled. He thought it was a bonkers idea. “You didn't have to be a geophysicist, which I wasn't, to see some defects with this scheme,” he wrote, per the Daily Mail. According to him, there were several loopholes in the strategy. The “angular momentum” of rocks, air, and water on Earth’s surface would cause everything on the planet to continue moving sideways at enormous speed. Objects would be flying through the wind and structures would collapse into rubble.
If the Earth’s rotation had stopped, even for a brief period, it would have wiped away life from the planet and had catastrophic consequences, per Space. Everything not attached to the planet would be moving at around 1000 mph (1,600 km/hr), as Ellsberg also said. Extreme forces would have likely triggered tsunamis or earthquakes. Since air and ocean currents are influenced by Earth’s rotation, the length of days and nights would have drastically changed.
While one part of the planet would receive fierce sunlight, others would be deemed as unhabitable. Lakes would boil, and life would survive only on a tiny strip of the planet. Besides, the Earth’s magnetic field that protects life from harmful radiation works when liquid metal flows to its outer core, creating electrical currents that require Earth’s rotation.
And even if they were to execute this hysterical plan, it wasn’t possible anyway. Speaking to Ellsberg, a physicist explained that even 1,000 rockets would be far too little to stop Earth’s rotation, and if you somehow could summon up enough thrust to pause Earth’s rotation, it would probably tear the planet’s surface apart. Mathematics says the same thing. According to math, this scheme would have required around “a million billion” rocket engines, not just a thousand. And by no means, the Air Force could procure this quantity, per IFL Science.
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