25. The American Plan to Stop the 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 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.