Great Leap Downward

Several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.

—Mao Tse-tung, March 1927

Was the Chairman prescient? Could he have anticipated by more than four decades an ingenious scheme just conceived by University of Alaska Geophysicist David Stone? If Mao had carried his maxim a little farther, says Stone in a tongue-in-cheek letter to Geotimes, China could have threatened distant enemies with mass destruction years before the development of nuclear warheads and long-range missiles.

If at a given moment, says Stone, all 750 million Chinese obeyed a command to jump from 6½-ft. platforms, they could constitute a "geophysical weapon." How? Assuming that the average Chinese weighs 110 lbs., he calculates, the energy released by this great leap downward would be equivalent to an earthquake of magnitude 4.5 on the Richter scale, causing extensive damage in China. But if the Chinese were organized to jump roughly every 54 minutes—just when the peak of a barely perceptible natural ripple that continually sweeps around the earth's surface passes through China—they might set up a world-girdling resonant ground wave that would cause even greater damage in distant lands. By properly aligning their millions and carefully timing the jump, for example, Peking could aim a ground wave along the Pacific-rim earthquake belt and possibly set off quakes in California far more devastating than the original shocks in China.

Would there be any defense? Certainly, says Stone. By having its population jump between the peaks of the ground waves stirred up by China, a threatened nation could damp them out before they grew intense enough to cause damage. There is one catch: the target nation would, of course, be less populous than China. Thus, to effectively counteract the massive Chinese geophysical aggression, its people would have to jump from higher platforms.