23. A Cure Way Worse Than the Disease
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.
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.