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

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2022 39 min

23. A Cure Way Worse Than the Disease

Plan - Rather than use 1 rocket to catch 1 Roadrunner, what if we used many rockets to pause the Earth's spin? — Rather than use 1 rocket to catch 1 Roadrunner, what if we used many rockets to pause the Earth’s spin? Warner Brothers

The US Air Force’s spitball 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.

Depiction of a nuclear weapon being fired to the Moon – Priceonomics

Assume a 30 minute ICBM flight time from the USSR to Washington, DC, and a 20 minute warning. For the missile to miss by 10 miles, Earth’s rotation would have to be slowed by about 30 miles for 20 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 wreak havoc across the planet. A nuclear Armageddon would actually be mild compared to that.

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.