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

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2022 39 min

24. A Bonkers Plan Straight Out of the Saturday Morning Cartoons

Project Retro examined the possibility of stopping the Earth’s rotation. NASA

PROJECT RETRO was like a Wile E. Coyote plan in that, like many of his schemes, the science actually works in theory. Once launched, the Cold War’s early ballistic missiles could not be redirected. Because of Earth’s rotation, to hit something with a ballistic missile is like shooting an arrow at a moving target. In both cases, the shooter has 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 30 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 30 minutes.

Central Park - Anti-nuclear movement — Protesters at the Rally for Peace and Disarmament June 2nd, 1982
http://www.wnyc.org/

However, if the target stops moving after an arrow or missile is launched, the result will be a miss. So the United States Air Force floated a plan to use rocket engines – specifically “a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines” – to stop the Earth’s rotation. In theory, such a crazy Looney Tunes plan could foil Soviet ICBMs. Accordingly, the Air Force set out to test the theory’s feasibility. In 1960, it asked the RAND Corporation to evaluate the possibility of using giant stationary rocket engines to pause Earth’s rotation in case of nuclear attack. As seen below, there was something to the theory, but to go from theory to practice was problematic.

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.