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Russia Confirms Failed Missile Launch Caused Norway's Light Show
Ch_Omega writes "According to this article over at BarentsObserver, the giant spiral seen on the sky over Norway Wednesday morning local time has been confirmed to be the result of a failed Russian missile launch. Russia now confirms that '...the missile was launched from submerged position in the White Sea by the nuclear submarine Dmitri Donskoy. Studies of the telemetric data from the launch show that the two first stages of the missile functioned as they should, and that a technical malfunctioning occurred during the third stage.' There is also an article on this at The Daily Mail."
There was once a time that Russia would have just kept schtum. How many UFO reports are due to similar failed firings prior to the end of the Cold War?
So happy not to be living in the cold war. Today, I like to think it's harder for fictional missiles to start WW3. Fewer false positives. Of course, here the missile was actually launched...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Worse, Russia doesn't really have a lot of ice-free coastline, especially during the winter. And the few they do have can easily be blocked from the open sea by NATO countries.
It was one of the big issues during the cold wars, afaik even one of the core reasons for the Vietnam war.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
North Vietnam was backed primarily by the Soviets, not the Chinese. In fact, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, China and Vietnam got into a shooting match over the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia.
The Soviets needed more warm-water ports, and Vietnam was willing to provide this. This also put a significant portion of the world's shipping lanes within striking distance of Soviet forces. The domino theory may have been an overblown fear, but a significant base of operations in that part of the world is all that the USSR needed to make a serious nuisance in case things heated up.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Typhoon class submarines (the Dmitri Donskoi belongs to this class) are not supposed to fire missiles from underwater. They are supposed to break the ice pack to launch their payload. So, this is either a very interesting evolution, or bad reporting.