America’s Bizarre Cold War Plan to Stop Earth’s Rotation Using 1,000 Rockets Still Boggles Our Minds

The Cold War was one of the most tyrannical battles in human history. Two huge superpowers, the United States and the USSR, were eager to dominate the other and become the world superpower. In the midst of this frightening scenario that loomed over a gigantic part of the world, the US Air Force came up with a crazy plan to destroy the Soviet army. But instead of being creative, this plan led to the destruction of life on Earth, reported the Daily Mail.

This crazy plan was first made public by Daniel Ellsberg in his 2017 book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Called “Project Retro,” the classified plan suggested that the Air Force would use “a huge rectangular array of a thousand first-stage Atlas engines,” the largest rocket propulsion engine available, “that would be securely attached to the earth in a horizontal position,” oriented away from the direction of the Earth’s rotation, generating a thrust so great that the Earth’s rotation would momentarily stop. This would mean that Russian nuclear missiles would overshoot the missile bases they were targeting.

Air Force officials passed the plan to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Ellsberg. “The officer behind the proposal envisioned that if our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars detected and reported on NORAD’s massive display screens a large flight of missile warheads coming from the North Pole toward our missile fields in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Missouri, the Atlas engines would be fired, as simultaneously as possible, to momentarily stop the Earth’s rotation,” Ellsberg wrote, according to the Daily Grail.

Ellsberg was working as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation (research and development). When he received the proposal, he was baffled. He thought it was a crazy idea. “You didn’t have to be a geophysicist, which I wasn’t, to see some of the flaws in this project,” he wrote to the Daily Mail. The strategy, he said, had several flaws. The “angular momentum” of rocks, air, and water on the Earth’s surface would cause everything on the planet to continue to move sideways at enormous speeds. Objects would fly in the wind and structures would collapse into rubble.

If Earth’s rotation had stopped, even for a brief period, it would have wiped out life on the planet and had catastrophic consequences, according to Space. Anything not attached to the planet would be moving at about 1,000 mph, Ellsberg also said. Extreme forces would likely have triggered tsunamis or earthquakes. Since air and ocean currents are influenced by Earth’s rotation, the length of days and nights would have changed dramatically.

While some of the planet would be subject to intense sunlight, others would be considered uninhabitable. Lakes would boil and life would survive only on a tiny strip of the planet. Additionally, the Earth’s magnetic field that protects life from harmful radiation works when liquid metal flows toward its outer core, creating electrical currents that require the Earth to rotate.

And even if this hysterical plan were to be carried out, it wouldn’t be possible anyway. A physicist explained to Ellsberg that even 1,000 rockets would be far too few to stop the Earth’s rotation, and that if they could somehow muster enough thrust to stop the Earth’s rotation, it would probably tear the planet’s surface apart. Mathematics says the same thing. According to mathematics, this project would have required about “a million billion” rocket engines, not just a thousand. And there’s no way the Air Force could afford that many, according to IFL Science.