28. Even If The Earth’s Rotation Could Have Been Stopped, it Would Have Been a Cure Worse Than the Disease
As it turned out, the US Air Force’s spitball guesstimate of needing a thousand rocket engines to pause the Earth’s rotation was 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. And even if Pentagon could afford it, pausing the planet’s spin would have been worse than just letting all the Soviet nukes hit their targets.
Assume a 30 minute ICBM flight time from Russia 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 shattering earthquakes, massive tsunamis, and super hurricanes – all beyond anything ever recorded in human history – wreaking havoc across the planet. A nuclear Armageddon would actually be mild compared to that.