6. A Scheme to Stop the Earth’s Spinning
The Cold War was terrifying at times, as two jittery superpowers glared at each other while armed with enough nukes to exterminate humanity many times over. People living in fear sometimes come up with, let us say, “creative” ideas. As with most ideas, some of them turn out to be brilliant brainstorms, but most are not. Of the latter, few ideas were loonier than a scheme to stop the Earth’s rotation in order to foil Soviet nukes. As pure logic, it was sound. To launch an ICBM to nuke 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 spin. It was like a Wile E. Coyote plan in that the science actually works in theory. Once launched, 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. You have 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. E.g.; say it takes an ICBM thirty minutes to fly from the USSR to Washington, DC. The Soviets will aim it not at where Washington is at the time of launch, but at where Washington will be, because of the Earth’s rotation, in half an hour. But what if Washington was not where it was expected to be?
