The insane Cold War plan to protect America from Russian nukes – by stopping the Earth’s rotation using 1,000 rockets

In 1960, American military analysts devised a plan to stop the Earth’s rotation and protect the US from a Russian nuclear attack.

The idea of ​​Project Retro was simple: 1,000 massive rockets, normally used to launch nuclear weapons and spacecraft, would generate so much thrust that the Earth’s rotation would momentarily pause.

This would mean that Soviet nuclear missiles would overshoot the missile bases they were aimed at.

The secret proposal suggested that if US missile detection systems detected Soviet missiles flying over the North Pole towards missile fields in Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Missouri, the rectangular field of Atlas missiles could be activated.

A US Air Force Atlas missile takes off in 1958 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Earth’s rotation would pause for a moment, and at this point the rockets (already on their inertial path) would fly over their targets.

The plan was seen and initialed by several Air Force officials before it landed on the desk of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner who also conducted the Pentagon’s review of the Cuban Missile Crisis, revealed the plans in his book “The Doomsday Machine.”

At first he thought the plan to interrupt the Earth’s rotation was a joke, but when he saw that it had been initialed by several officials, he realized that it was not.

Ellsberg, who died in 2023, wrote that the plan was that the Soviet missiles had missed their targets.

‘Our retaliatory force on land would be saved. To—presumably, when things had settled down and the Earth was turning normally again—to launch a retaliatory attack on the cities and soft military targets (their missiles had already left their hardened silos) in the Soviet Union.”

But there were several flaws in the plan, Ellsberg realized.

The ‘angular momentum’ of rocks, air and water on the Earth’s surface would mean that everything on the planet would continue to move sideways at enormous speed (at the equator the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over 1,000 miles per hour) .

Ellsberg wrote, “You didn’t have to be a geophysicist, which I wasn’t, to see some flaws in this plan.

An Atlas rocket on the launch pad

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg speaks at a press conference in 2010

‘There was a lot of stuff flying through the air. In fact, everything that wasn’t nailed down, and most of what was, would disappear with the wind, which itself would fly everywhere at once with super-hurricane force.”

Ellsberg explained that coastal cities would be wiped out by massive 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 circumstances of nuclear war to launch their missiles or surface, since there is nothing left to destroying would be on the ground. the surface of the Soviet Union, or the United States, or wherever.

“All the structures would have collapsed, along with the rubble, along with all the people who had joined the wind and the water in their horizontal movement across the face of the earth into space.”

Ellsberg later spoke to a physicist who explained that even 1,000 rockets would be far too few to stop the Earth’s rotation — and if you could somehow muster enough thrust to pause the Earth’s rotation, you would this is likely to tear the planet’s surface apart.

Speaking to LiveScience, James Zimbelman, senior geologist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, explains that if the Earth stopped spinning, the momentum would tear every object on Earth away from the surface.

Rocks, objects, and people then rained 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 estimating casualties from a 1961 U.S. attack at more than 500 million dead, including collateral damage from fallout in Europe — said the plan was just part of a nuclear war machine he described. as ‘criminally insane’.

He wrote: ‘As I was soon to discover, the Joint Chiefs’ estimates of the effects of carrying out their initial attack plans, under a variety of circumstances, envisaged killing more than half a billion people with our own weapons in a few months time. most of which are dead within a day or two.

‘How else can you describe that other than madness? Should the 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 that.’

The weirdest doomsday devices from the 50s and 60s

Nuclear-powered jet aircraft

A SLAM (Wikimedia Commons)

The SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile), often inaccurately described as an open nuclear reactor that would irradiate areas it flew over, was an unmanned aerial vehicle with a range of over 100,000 miles, powered by a nuclear engine, designed to deliver thermonuclear warheads to the Soviet -Union. area. It was conceived in 1955 and was replaced by ICBM technology.

Nuclear landmines

A nuclear landmine (Wikimedia Commons)

Atomic Demolition Munitions (known as ‘nuclear landmines’), tested by the US (pictured) during Operation Buster-Jangle, are designed to be buried by soldiers and later detonated to hinder enemy forces: they were used during the Cold War initiated in Europe.

Air-to-air nuclear missiles

The Genie air-to-air missile was built to neutralize enemy bomber formations

The Genie unguided missile had a nuclear warhead and was designed for use against enemy bomber formations. In a demonstration to show that the missile (which had little fallout because it detonated in mid-air) could be used over American cities, a Engineer was detonated with five Air Force officers underneath it.

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