In 1960, American military analysts devised a plan to stop the Earth’s rotation and protect the United States from a Russian nuclear attack.
The idea of Project Retro was simple: 1,000 huge rockets, normally used to launch nuclear weapons and spacecraft, would generate so much thrust that the Earth’s rotation would briefly stop.
This would mean that Soviet nuclear missiles would overwhelm the missile bases they were targeting.
The classified proposal suggested that when US missile detection systems detected Soviet missiles flying over the North Pole toward missile fields in Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Missouri, the rectangular Atlas rocket field could be activated.
An Atlas rocket
A US Air Force Atlas missile takes off in 1958 (Wikimedia Commons)
The Earth’s rotation would stop momentarily and, at that point, the missiles (already on their inertial trajectory) would fly over their targets.
The plan had been seen and signed by several Air Force officers, before landing on the desk of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner who also led the Pentagon’s review of the Cuban missile crisis, revealed the plans in his book ‘The Doomsday Machine.’
He initially thought that the plan to stop the Earth’s rotation was a joke, but when he saw that it had been signed by several officials, he realized that it was not.
Ellsberg, who died in 2023, wrote that the plan was that after the Soviet missiles missed their targets.
‘Our ground retaliation force would be saved. Carry out – presumably, when things had calmed down and the earth was spinning normally again – a retaliatory attack against cities and soft military targets (their missiles had already left their reinforced silos) in the Soviet Union.
But Ellsberg realized that the plan had several flaws.
The “angular momentum” of rocks, air and water at the Earth’s surface would mean that everything on the planet would continue to move laterally at enormous speed (at the equator, the Earth’s rotation speed is just over 1,600 km/h).
Ellsberg wrote: “It was not necessary to be a geophysicist, which I was not, to see some flaws in this scheme.
An Atlas rocket on the launch pad.
Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg speaks at a press conference in 2010
“A lot of things would fly through the air. In fact, everything that wasn’t nailed down, and most of what was nailed down as well, would be blown away by the wind, which in turn would blow with super-hurricane force everywhere at once.
Ellsberg explained that coastal cities would be devastated by enormous tsunamis and that the apocalypse unleashed by Project Retro would, ironically, be as bad as anything thermonuclear weapons could do to our planet.
Ellsberg wrote: “The Minuteman launch control officers, safe in their capsules deep underground, would have even less reason than under the foreseeable conditions of a nuclear war to launch their missiles or surface, since there would be no left nothing to destroy on the surface of the Soviet Union, or the United States, or anywhere.
‘All the structures would have collapsed, with the rubble, along with all the people joining the wind and water in their horizontal movement across the face of the earth, into space.’
Ellsberg later spoke with a physicist who explained that even 1,000 rockets would be too few to stop the Earth’s rotation, and if enough thrust could somehow be mustered to stop the Earth’s rotation, it would likely tear up the planet’s surface. .
Speaking to LiveScience, James Zimbelman, a geologist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, explains that if the Earth stopped spinning, the momentum would rip all of Earth’s objects from the surface.
Rocks, objects, and people would then rain down on the surface, liquefying the crust and turning the surface into an ocean of molten rock.
Ellsberg, who at one point saw a President’s Eyes Only document that estimated the casualties of a 1961 U.S. attack at more than 500 million deaths, including collateral damage from radioactive fallout in Europe, said the plan was only part of a nuclear war machine he described. as “criminally insane.”
He wrote: “As I would soon discover, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s estimates of the effects of carrying out their first-strike plans, under a variety of circumstances, anticipated the deaths of more than 500 million human beings with our own weapons in a matter of months. And most of them died within a day or two.
‘How do you describe that, other than crazy? Should Pentagon officials and their subordinates have been institutionalized? But that was precisely the problem: they already were. Their institutions not only promoted this madness, they demanded it. And I still do it.
The strangest apocalyptic devices of the 50s and 60s
nuclear powered jet
A SLAM (Wikimedia Commons)
Often incorrectly described as having an open nuclear reactor that would irradiate the areas over which it flew, the SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) was an unmanned aircraft with a range of over 100,000 miles powered by a nuclear engine, designed to launch thermonuclear warheads on the Soviet Union. territory. Conceived in 1955, it was replaced by ICBM technology.
Nuclear landmines
A nuclear landmine (Wikimedia Commons)
Tested by the United States (pictured) in Operation Buster-Jangle, atomic demolition munitions (known as ‘nuclear landmines) are designed to be buried by soldiers and later detonated to deter enemy forces: they were deployed in Europe during the Cold War.
Air-to-air nuclear missiles
The Genie air-to-air missile was built to eliminate enemy bomber formations.
The Genie unguided missile had a nuclear warhead and was designed to be used against enemy bomber formations. In a demonstration to demonstrate that the missile (which had little consequence because it was detonated in mid-air) could be used over American cities, a Genie was detonated with five Air Force officers standing beneath it.
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