History has had plenty of crazy moments. However, few were nuttier than that one time when American Cold War planners researched the possibility of stopping the Earth’s rotation. The reason? It would mess with the complex math used in Soviet ballistic missiles’ targeting. Following thirty things about that and other loony moments from history.
30. The Crazy Cold War Plan to Pause Earth’s Rotation
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 that hatched up to foil Soviet nukes by stopping the Earth’s rotation. There was actually a method to the madness. Launching an ICBM to nuke a target thousands of miles away involves intricate calculations that include planetary rotation. Tinkering with Earth’s rotation would mess with 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 spinning.
