5. A Solution Worse Than the Problem
If a projectile is aimed at where a moving target will be, but the target stops after the projectile is launched, the projectile will miss. So the US Air Force floated a scheme to use “a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas [rocket] engines” – to stop the Earth’s rotation. Theoretically, that could foil Soviet ICBMs. In 1960, the Air Force asked the RAND Corporation to evaluate the possibility of using giant stationary rocket engines to pause Earth’s rotation in case of nuclear attack. There was something to the theory, but to go from theory to practice was problematic. The Air Force’s guesstimate that a thousand rocket engines would be needed to pause the Earth’s rotation turned out to be too low. As Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation planner who crunched the numbers concluded, it required 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. Moreover, even if the Pentagon could afford it and even if the plan was feasible, it would be better to just let all the Soviet nukes hit their targets than to pause the planet’s spin. Assume a thirty minute ICBM flight time from the USSR to Washington, DC, and a twenty minute warning. For the missile to miss by ten miles, Earth’s rotation would have to be slowed by about thirty miles for twenty 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 catastrophic earthquakes, massive tsunamis, and super hurricanes that would wreck the planet. A nuclear Armageddon would actually be mild compared to that.
