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The Craziest Schemes that the Government Ever Tried to Push on the Masses

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2022 39 min

25. The American Plan to Stop the Earth’s Rotation

Plan - The Cold War was a seriously scary time — The Cold War was a seriously scary time. Png Wing

The Cold War was one of the scarier stretches of human history. As in pants-soiling scary at times, with two jittery superpowers glaring at each other while armed with enough nukes to wipe out humanity many times over. One of the things about scared people is that the fear sometimes drives them to come up with, let us say, “creative” ideas. As with most ideas, some of them turn out to be brilliant brainstorms, but many more turn out to be brain farts.

Of the latter, few ideas were crazier than a plan to stop the Earth’s rotation in order to foil Soviet nukes. There was actually a method to the madness. To launch an ICBM in order to nuke a target thousands of miles away involves intricate calculations that include planetary rotation. If you can tinker with Earth’s rotation, it 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.