During the Cold War, when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, the U.S. Air Force considered an unusual defense strategy. They considered stopping the Earth's rotation for a moment to divert Soviet missiles flying over the North Pole to their missile fields in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Missouri. This suggestion was made by an officer who envisioned that by stopping the Earth's rotation for a moment, Soviet missiles would bypass or fly over targets intended for attack on their inertial trajectory. Our ground retaliatory forces would be spared to strike back at cities and unprotected military targets in the Soviet Union.
This defense strategy surprised and shocked many scholars and experts. Daniel Ellsberg, a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation who studied these plans, said in his 2017 book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, that it would require 2.6 x 10 21 kg of fuel, about 500 times the mass of the Earth's atmosphere. Assuming you can build that many engines, once you run them for the time it takes to change the Earth's rotation, you will release 500 times that much gas into the atmosphere, all with incredibly hot combustion products.
Even if your targets survived a nuclear war, they would all be incinerated by all the exhaust that would spread across the planet. This proposal was not only insane, but dangerous to life on Earth.
If the U.S. Air Force had carried out this plan, it could have been catastrophic for the planet. The Earth's rotation is slowed and accelerated by various factors, including earthquakes, and if the Earth were to suddenly stop, it would be a different matter. Water, rocks, and other debris would fly eastward at 1,610 kilometers per hour (1,000 miles per hour), tearing up the surface and sending new fragments of earth and rocks into the atmosphere and space.
This proposal was rejected, and for that we can be thankful. But it reminds us of the crazy and dangerous ideas that can arise in the face of global tension and conflict.
По материалам: http://www.planet-today.com/2023/06/the-us-air-force-planned-to-stop-earths.html