My Dad follows this facebook page called "We are Mighty" & they posted this article on there about "Project Retro", a plan by the U.S to stop the Earth's rotation with rockets to throw Russian missiles off course during the Cold War. We all know how facebook can be about facts, (in a whisper) facebook doesn't have a very good reputation, & I wanted to ask people that really know.
Daniel Ellsberg says (in his book The Doomsday Machine) that the USAF asked the RAND Corporation to evaluate whether such a thing was possible. The answer is: no, it's not possible, in the slightest.
So calling it a "plan" is a bit of an overstatement. It was an official query, albeit a totally silly one. But these were times in which science-fiction could become science-fact rather suddenly, so asking questions that turned out to be totally silly in retrospect was somewhat par for the course (following the Sputnik launch, the US government created an agency — ARPA — whose whole goal was to look at "out there" projects that might have a small chance of success but, if they did, could be "game changers").