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 hatched a plan to stop Earth rotation and protect the US 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 Earth’s rotation would briefly pause.

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

The classified proposal suggested that when America's 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 rockets could be triggered.

An Atlas rocket

A U.S. Air Force Atlas missile takes off in 1958 (Wikimedia Commons) 

Earth’s rotation would pause momentarily, and at this point, the missiles (already on their inertial path) would overfly their targets.

The plan had been seen and initialed by various 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’.

He initially thought the plan to pause Earth’s rotation was a joke - but seeing that it had been initialed by multiple officials, he realized it wasn’t.

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

‘Our land-based retaliatory force would be saved. To carry out-presumably, when things had settled down and earth was again spinning normally-a retaliatory attack against the cities and soft military targets (their missiles having 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 Earth’s surface would mean that everything on the planet would continue moving sideways at enormous speed (at the equator, the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over 1,000mph.

Ellsberg wrote, ‘You didn't have to be a geophysicist, which I wasn't, to see some defects with this scheme. 

An Atlas rocket on the launch pad

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg 

Daniel Ellsberg speaks at a news conference in 2010

'An awful lot of stuff would be flying through the air. Everything, in fact, that wasn't nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at once.’

Ellsberg explained that cities on the coasts would be wiped out by huge tsunamis, and the apocalypse unleashed by Project Retro would, ironically, be as bad as anything that 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 in the foreseeable conditions of nuclear war either to launch their missiles or to come above ground, since there would be nothing left to destroy on the surface of the Soviet Union, or the United States, or anywhere.

‘All structures would have collapsed, with the rubble, along with all the people joining 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 little to stop Earth’s rotation - and if you somehow could summon up enough thrust to pause Earth’s rotation, it would probably 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, were Earth to stop spinning, the momentum would tear every object on Earth away 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 which estimated the casualties from a U.S. strike in 1961 at more than 500 million deaths including collateral damage from fallout in Europe - said that the plan was just part of a nuclear war machine he described as ‘criminally insane’.

He wrote: ‘As I would soon discover, the Joint Chiefs' estimates of the effects of carrying out their first strike plans, under a variety of circumstances, foresaw killing more than half a billion humans with our own weapons in a matter of months, with most of them dead in a day or two.

‘How to describe that, other than insanity? 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 insanity, they demanded it. And still do.’

The weirdest doomsday devices of the 50s and 60s 

Nuclear-powered jet

A SLAM (Wikimedia Commons)

Often inaccurately described as having an open nuclear reactor which would irradiate areas it flew over, the SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) was an unmanned aircraft with a range of more than 100,000 miles powered by a nuclear engine, designed to deliver thermonuclear warheads into Soviet territory. Conceived in 1955, it was superseded by ICBM technology.

Nuclear land mines

A nuclear land mine (Wikimedia Commons)

Tested by the U.S. (pictured) in Operation Buster-Jangle, Atomic Demolition Munitions (known as ‘nuclear land mines) are designed to be buried by soldiers and detonated later to impede 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 take out 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 show that the missile (which had little fallout due to being detonated mid-air) could be used over American cities, a Genie was detonated with five Air Force officers standing below it.

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