Thread by @LOLrakshak

Today's #quizzytime : Who hatched a plan to stop the Earth from rotating?

Quiz ends at 2 PM. Google if you like.

Ans: During the cold war the Pentagon came up with a bonkers plan to cause the Soviet nukes to miss America- stop the Earth from rotating. There was actually a method to the madness. Launching a missile to hit a target 1000s of miles away involves calculating planetary rotation.

You have to aim for where the target WILL be, in say 30 minutes. PROJECT RETRO was a research effort into what it would take to pause the planet’s spinning so that the target would not move at all. The United States Air Force floated the idea of using rocket engines –

specifically “a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines” – to stop the Earth from moving. In 1960, it tasked the RAND Corporation with evaluating the possibility of using giant stationary rocket engines to pause Earth’s rotation in case of nuclear attack.

The plan was abandoned, not because stopping the Earth's rotation would cause mass destruction through Tsunamis, Earthquakes and super hurricanes, making nuclear Armageddon seem mild in comparison - but because RAND estimated that 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“. And this was beyond even the Pentagon’s budget. Check out this podcast about Daniel Ellsberg the whistleblower from RAND. npr.org/2018/01/19/579…