The still-spinning core would get the crust back up to speed with quite a snap.
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That tower would need to be able to take an enormous amount of strain. I mean like "huge!!!"
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I’m sure that they have an app in place that can shift the GPS results in a given (large) area.
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Uh, the nukes may miss their targets, but don’t they still land somewhere?
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I realize that the cold war was a…special time…for decision making; but even so I’m a bit surprised that this one made it to the point of having the RAND corporation write something up. The orders of magnitude just don’t begin to line up.
As members of the air force interested in contemporary apocalypse studies would have presumably known, the SM-65 that one of those engines was intended to fly was just under 125,000kg.
The earth is, what, 19 orders of magnitude more massive?(and 5.9ish x10^24 to the 1.25 x10^5; but when your comparisons are between “x10^5” and “x10^24” the first term is hard to get too excited about even if it had been in your favor).
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“US Air Force asked the RAND Corporation…”
Three Bronx cheers for military intelligence!!!
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What, no the Day the Earth Stood Still references?
Are the happy mutants losing their touch, or something?
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Senator Braindead (Wisconsin or somesuch) probably thought it was a good question to ask, and as he was head of the powerful Senate Sub-Committee of Throwing Money at Things, it was best that RAND gave it a “serious” answer. As for RAND…
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What’s cheaper, rockets or impossibly strong towers ? Maybe if it’s made of rebar…
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Turn the rockets around, duh.
Seriously, wasn’t there a single intelligent person around when this was proposed? Did nobody think to ask Isaac Asimov?
The earth is, what, 19 orders of magnitude more massive?
So 19 times as hard, right?
I suspect you would have to write the number out in long hand, wrapping around when you ran out of black board before the audience got a handle on the problem.
I reckon it could bring America a lot closer to Africa in the process. So close that immigration from the south would be the least of the USA’s problems.
You can use less rockets if you put them on top of a huge tower, to act like a lever (maybe ? can someone do the math ?).
Forget the rockets. I reckon the tower alone would do the job nicely.
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Yeah, this is an excellent XKCD What-If? There are so many effects and side effects from “just” stopping Earth’s rotation.
It’s so weird that someone at Pentagon could come up with this idea and that it could pass through several hands and ever make it to RAND. And how long did it take RAND to stop laughing? (Or is a proposal like this a slow Tuesday?)
This isn’t thinking outside the box. This is thinking outside the brain.
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Kiss? phffft.
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Well, no one I can see is saying that it wasn’t dropped.
I think it’s one of those ideas that comes up when ‘brainstorming’ or ‘thinking outside the box’.
I suspect we’ve all suffered through those kinds of planning sessions where someone tries to enthuse everyone about putting up any kind of idea no matter how bonkers and then evaluating each of them.
I’d say this is one of those. Some one comes up with the idea as one of 20-30 different suggestions and it’s chucked to the consultants to evaluate.
The answer comes back - This is bonkers (in suitable 1960’s scientist language).
Everyone moves on to suggestion 232, let’s bury chickens inside nuclear landmines all over West Germany (actually that was the Brits).
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Thank you for that.
I didn’t know Blue Peacock and the chicken-powered landmine until now.
Since we are approaching a new cold war, I wonder what ideas are currently evaluated. I can easily imagine that certain leaders are asking their staff to think outside of the box.
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Bring back the M-388, I say.
I spent the better part of 1986 guarding tactical nukes, sorry, devices.
To the best of my knowledge W48 and 203mm W79 shells, to be fired from howitzers. Unless the bunkers were empty. Need to know, etc.
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I remember looking at the firing tables for the Davy Crocket. The range was…unimpressive. ISTR something like 1.25 miles in normal weather.
Of course the other problem with their “plan” is that if you put all those rockets within the US, you’d be more likely to tear the US off the map than to stop the rotation of the entire Earth.
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Nah. We’re disappointed and fatigued from all the dashed dreams. If the Good Galactic Police Squad haven’t made a stop in Washington DC and Moscow by now, then…
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I assume that the user’s manual didn’t come out and say this; but I suspect that nobody involved in the program was under the misapprehension that it was named after Mr. Crockett because of his achievements in congress rather than his reputation for famous last stands.
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