During the Cold War, while the threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union loomed large, American scientists devised an incredibly bizarre and audacious plan to avoid Soviet nuclear missiles. In the 1960s, US physicists proposed that to thwart incoming Soviet missiles, they could stop the Earth’s rotation.
Details and Execution of the Plan
According to the US calculations, if the Soviet Union launched nuclear missiles towards the US, halting or significantly slowing down the Earth’s rotation would cause these missiles to miss their targets and land west of the intended sites in the US. While theoretically feasible, the execution of this plan required unimaginable power and precision. The idea was to launch several hundred Atlas rockets simultaneously and at the correct angle to create a counter-force to the Earth’s rotation.
The plan involved the US missile detection systems spotting Soviet missiles flying over the North Pole towards missile sites in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Missouri. Upon detection, the Atlas rockets would be launched to counteract the Earth’s rotation.
Support and Cancellation of the Plan
Initially, this plan received approval from numerous high-ranking military bureaucrats and government officials. They were even ready to spend vast sums of money to construct hundreds of Atlas rockets.
However, the plan was eventually canceled when some dissenting scientists in the Pentagon pointed out the catastrophic consequences of stopping the Earth’s rotation. They explained that such an action would cause global devastation through massive earthquakes and colossal tsunamis, making a nuclear strike seem less destructive by comparison. Stopping an object moving at 1,600 km per second and expecting to survive highlighted the extreme and irrational paranoia of nuclear war that pervaded the 1960s.
The Illogical Paranoia of Nuclear War
This episode vividly illustrates how deeply the fear of nuclear war infiltrated the minds of people during the 1960s, leading them to entertain absurdly extreme ideas. The US’s plan to halt the Earth’s rotation stands as a cautionary tale of the era’s rampant paranoia and its potential for driving humanity to the brink of irrationality.
The Realism of the Fallout Series
With this knowledge, we can appreciate how the video game series Fallout, which satirizes and explores the consequences of a nuclear apocalypse, may not be as exaggerated as it seems. The US’s Cold War plan serves as a testament to the lengths to which nations might go under the pressure of imminent nuclear conflict, making the dystopian world of Fallout eerily plausible.
