Similar to the scene in Liu Cixin's science fiction novel "The Wandering Earth", in 1960, American military analysts conceived a plan to stop the Earth's rotation.
The idea of the project backtrack is simple: 1,000 huge rockets, usually used to launch nuclear weapons and spacecraft, will produce such a huge thrust that the rotation of the Earth will come to a brief halt.
This plan was used to avoid the former Soviet Union's nuclear missile location sites, causing it to miss the missile bases they were targeting.
The classified proposal suggested that the rectangular Atlas rocket field could be triggered when a U.S. missile detection system detected a Soviet missile flying over the North Pole toward missile ranges in the Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Missouri.
There will be a short pause in the rotation of the Earth, and at this moment the missiles (already on their inertial path) will fly over their targets.
The plan had been viewed and preliminarily approved by multiple Air Force officials, and then it appeared on the desk of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner who also conducted the Pentagon's review of the Cuban Missile Crisis, exposed the plans in his book The Doom Machine.
He initially thought the plan to stop the planet from rotating was a joke — but seeing that it had been preliminarily approved by multiple officials, he realized it wasn't.
Ellsberg, who died in 2023, wrote that the plan came after Soviet missiles missed their targets.
"Our land-based retaliatory forces will be saved. Carried out – presumably, when things subsided and the Earth rotated normally again – retaliatory attacks on Soviet cities and soft military targets (whose missiles had already left their hardened silos). ”
But Ellsberg realized that the plan had several flaws.
The "angular momentum" of rocks, air, and water on Earth will mean that everything on the planet will continue to move sideways at tremendous speed (at the equator, the Earth rotates at just over 1,000 mph).
Ellsberg wrote, "You don't have to be a geophysicist, and I'm not, to see some of the flaws in this plan."
"There will be a lot of things flying in the air. In fact, everything that is not fixed, and most that is fixed, will also go with the wind, and the wind itself will fly at the same time everywhere with the force of a superhurricane. ”
Ellsberg explained that coastal cities would be destroyed by a massive tsunami, and that the apocalypse of the project's retroactive release would be ironic and as bad as anything thermonuclear weapons could do to our planet.
"Militia launch control officers, safely in their capsules buried deep underground, will have less reason to launch their missiles or come to the surface in the conditions of foreseeable nuclear war," Ellsberg wrote, "because there will be nothing left on the surface of the Soviet, American, or anywhere else to destroy."
"All the structures will collapse, and along with the rubble, along with all the people, join the horizontal movement of wind and water on the surface of the earth, into space."
Ellsberg later spoke with a physicist who explained that even 1,000 rockets would be nowhere near enough to stop the planet's rotation — and that if you could somehow summon enough thrust to pause the planet's rotation, it could tear the planet's surface apart.
In a conversation with LiveScience, James Zimblerman, a senior geologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, explained that if the Earth stops rotating, momentum will tear every object on Earth apart from the surface.
Rocks, objects and people will then fall on the surface, liquefiing the earth's crust and turning the surface into a sea of lava.