What Could Go Wrong?

The recent movie Oppenheimer pointed out that they set off the Trinity test bomb knowing that their calculations showed a non-zero chance it would destroy the atmosphere and kill all life on Earth. Turns out, that wasn't the craziest idea that came out of the Cold War.

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.

That's true, it would have meant that if it were technically feasible. But also...

[T]here 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....

'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.’

Fortunately, it wouldn't have worked anyway. You'd need a lot more than a thousand rockets to stop the earth.