Science & Technology

Insane Cold War nuclear defense plan sought to stop the Earth from spinning

By T.K. Randall
May 13, 2024

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) So great was the danger of nuclear armageddon during the Cold War that military analysts looked at every conceivable way to protect the United States from being annihilated by Soviet nukes.

Perhaps the strangest of these ideas was known as Project Retro.

The concept was relatively simple - nuclear missiles relied upon a complex series of calculations in order to correctly hit their targets, so if the rotation of the Earth changed, the nukes would all miss.

So began a concerted effort to find a way to temporarily stop the entire planet from spinning.

What scientists came up with was the quite insane idea of launching 1,000 large rockets all at the same time so that their collective thrust would disrupt the Earth's rotation.Of course, even if the enemy nukes missed their targets, they would still cause a huge amount of devastation, although the key military installations and nuclear launch sites would be spared.

"Our land-based retaliatory force would be saved," wrote whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

"To carry out - presumably, when things had settled down and Earth was again spinning normally - a retaliatory attack against the cities and soft military targets (their missiles having already left their hardened silos) in the Soviet Union."

There was a pretty major catch, however, in that the process of stopping the Earth's rotation would cause so much devastation through natural disasters and other problems that it would be almost as bad as a major nuclear strike.

For obvious reasons, the plan was ultimately scrapped.

Source: Mail Online

Tags: Earth, Nuclear