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How Nukes Were Almost Launched From Okinawa During Cuban Missile Crisis (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: Aaron Tovish is calling on the U.S. government to release documents pertaining to one of the scarier incidents of the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to an Air Force airman, the system designed to prevent an accidental launch of nuclear weapons failed as the codes ordering a launch were given in each of the three transmissions required for a launch: "By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches -- and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued."
Considering the number of incidents in the Cold War where a nuclear war was averted by cool heads, it makes me glad (as General Baringer would say) that our boys were in those silos, instead of a computer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Nothing can replace the wisdom or common sense of a discerning and skeptical human being.
Is that the only thing evidence we have to go on here? He could be senile, crazy, or just making shit up.
"...averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued."
I should think firing 32 nuclear missiles is the very definition of nuclear war.
It is encouraging, the number of times we read about launch orders being given and the people manning the silos or submarines disobeying those orders, only to find out later that a mistake had happened to generate the order.
That is a bright spot in humanity's hope for survival.
If those codes were given as intended, the nukes would have been launched. The people responsible for that are specifically chosen for their ability and willingness to accept orders. Fuck the assholes who make this shit up.
http://www.amazon.com/Command-...
A fun history of one particularly disturbing incident where a single dropped tool almost caused a huge explosion and also some other fun anecdotes as well. When you think about how true the phrase "to err is human" is, you have wonder why they ever thought building these WMDs was ever a good idea in the first place. Scary stuff.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Nobody's saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but let's not throw around the term nuclear war so lightly.
That seems like a reasonable deterrent. How else would we stop the Cuban software?
-Dave
Sadly I have absolutely no faith in Dick and Shrub to remain cool if placed in the same situation, and these loops had their fingers on the button.
That is all.
Damn near WAS all...thank $DEITY CPT Bassett had a good head on his shoulders.
From the first Fallout game :
In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.
A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Your family was part of that group that entered Vault Thirteen. Imprisoned safely behind the large Vault door, under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world.
So far, it have been mostly what I have imagine the world during a nuclear conflict, but how will it have turned out exactly? Is there a more thoughtful research on the subject? I've found a few text with a quick google search but none really catches my eyes so far.
Elok
As far as Japan and the end of WWII is concerned, we should have forgone the nukes, invaded and if it caused hundreds of thousands of deaths
You first.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anything from this .org should be taken with a great deal of skepticism until validated by a second reliable source. This is most definitely an anti-nuclear group. They don't even try to hide their agenda.
Suddenly having a prime minister who'd at least hesitate at the height of a crisis before nuking a few million civilians doesn't sound like such a bad idea...
http://blogs.new.spectator.co....
Those asswipe traitors would be the reason everyone was goosestepping to Hail Krusty the Kommie! If you have orders to launch then by GOD LAUNCH! The missiliers to-day are wimpier still, and even more poorly trained. GOD save us all when the Putin Wars start.!
Anecdotes like this practically answer the Fermi Paradox. We don't meet advanced civilizations because those civilizations destroy themselves fairly quickly. Once you have the technology to destroy your civilization, you only have to fuck up once to do it.
There have been several near-misses to nuclear Armageddon on both sides of the Atlantic. We got real lucky.
With that many near misses, we statistically should not be here*. Common sense is usually hit and miss during crisis.
Let's say common sense kicks in about half the time, which is typical of humans in crisis. We've had roughly 7 near misses. 0.5 to the 7th power is about 0.008, which is less than 1 percent. (Remember, it takes only one instance out of those 7 to finish us.)
I wonder if multi-verses are not at play: only "forked" realities in which we got "lucky" have us in it to ponder our luck. 99% of the forks got fried.
* At least not in large numbers. A few lucky stragglers perhaps could survive an all-out nuclear war. But most likely the vast majority of us would not be here reading this if launched.
Table-ized A.I.
What I find amazing is the fact that you use "we" to describe the actions of other people who are most decidedly NOT you.
So, we have: a single-sourced story from a news source that has in the past been an advocate of the removal of the U.S. base from Okinawa, an anonymous verification source (and thus unable to be contacted for independent verification), and a reprinting of the story by the BoAS, which has long changed its tune to keep itself as being seen as relevant.
I'm surprised that this story was even allowed to be printed, as single-sourced stories are usually laughed out of the editors' offices. Even in this case, if you allow 2 sources, usually you'd need hard evidence, not just hearsay.
How does the expression go? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? I don't see anything extraordinary here.
Is slashdot going to have a monthly column entitled one man vs the apocalypse? I mean do we need a near nuclear holocaust story every month?
Considering the number of incidents in the Cold War where a nuclear war was averted by cool heads, it makes me glad (as General Baringer would say) that our boys were in those silos, instead of a computer.
In a somewhat tangential note, the hotter heads frightened the cooler heads into making a deal. Castro basically told Khrushchev to go nuclear if Cuba is invaded by the US. Supposedly Castro's willingness to sacrifice his own country and millions around the globe to defend the global Communist movement frightened Khrushchev, convincing him Castro was nuts. Not so coincidentally Khrushchev and Kennedy reached a deal immediately after Khrushchev received Castro's letter.
Now sure the military has a great track record of screw ups and what could go wrong doing so.
But this one sounds like it has grown over time, like the stereotypical fish that got away story.
As far as Japan and the end of WWII is concerned, we should have forgone the nukes, invaded and if it caused hundreds of thousands of deaths on either side, then so be it.
Actually the invasion was expected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths on the US side and millions of deaths on the Japanese side (weapons + disease + starvation + ...).
There weren't any nuclear missile silos in Okinawa
You mean 000-00000-0000-00000?
Pfft. Almost.
Almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and atom bombs.
Oh wait.
No, not four. Childbearing is optimum around 17...18. And a lot of it happens around then (and some even earlier.) A family can build four generations in 60 years, or 70. The term "generations" isn't some fixed number. It's great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and kids. That's four generations on the face of the planet. 70 years is also, somewhat interestingly to me, about an average lifespan.
Nuclear weapons are the most profoundly successful peacemaker in history.
After seeing movies like "War Games" and "Testament", I spent a good portion of my childhood in 1980's America trying to wrap my mind around such a profoundly "peaceful" situation. As a boy I somehow got ahold of an account of the horrors suffered by the civilians targeted by the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs. I decided very early on that there was something profoundly & utterly insane about the M.A.D. status quo, and adults' tacit acceptance of it.
But people like you who hold up Mutually Assured Mass Murder as some sort of virtue...this goes beyond notions like peer pressure, consensus reality, or trying not to rock the boat and look like an anti-nuclear wingnut. Profound Stockholm Syndrome might describe it, perhaps the genes for capture bonding are strong in your lineage, or is there something more?
I prefer to think of it as the blackest, purest form of evil our species can practice. A technically & philosophically sophisticated evil, capable of profound ethical truths and great good, while simultaneously ignoring incredible contradictions and unanswered questions that are *easily* within its grasp...indeed, believing confident dismissal of such questions to be a virtue. A naïve, banal, dependable sort of evil perhaps within all of us, that allows a person to hug their children in the morning, got to work, and proudly spend the day building gas chambers for a well-spoken madman. A species-killing evil that has now built a planetary suicide device, and dutifully and unquestioningly handed the keys to a cadre of sociopaths, a power-mad gang of lawyers with nukes.
My God, what have we done?
I wonder if multi-verses are not at play: only "forked" realities in which we got "lucky" have us in it to ponder our luck. 99% of the forks got fried.
That's an interesting application of the Anthropic Principle.
One of the near-misses I read about was the commissioning of the DEW Line over-the-horizon early-warning radar.
There was some concern that the Russians might stage a pre-emptive strike just before it went into service. So the US put it into service a few days ahead of the announced date, disguised as a late-stage test of the equipment. The military and administration were prepared to react to the expected possible strike.
Some hours after the system went live it started showing volleys of missiles rising. Oops! Was it the feared attack? Was it time to retaliate, before the soviet missiles could wipe out that capability, leaving Russia in charge of a half-charred planet?
There was only one fly in the ointment: The system did not identify expected impact locations for the missiles. Failure of the computation, or a sign that this might be an illusion? (Remember this was 1957. Cray's first mainframe computer for CDC, with substantially less than 1 megaflop, was still three years in the future.)
The commander in charge smelled a rat, and recommended that the US NOT stage a "before their missiles wipe out most of our stuff" retaliatory strike, at least until we had other confirmation. The Russians actually WEREN'T attacking, so war-by-mistake was averted.
It turns out that the radars had seen Moonrise. The moon was big enough to be visible by the sensitive over-the-horizon radars. But the round trip was long enough that several pulses had gone out meanwhile. The radar paired the returns with later pulses - and between that, the size of the moon, and other details came up with a fleet of targets. The imaginary targets were not on a ballistic trajectory (it looked like a "forced orbit" - orbiting with acceleration still occuring, rather than a ballistic trajectory - and even if you assume the "engine" would cut off right now and it went ballistic, the illusion wouldn't hit the planet). So the failure to identify expected impact locations was correct. Somehow, previous tests hadn't happened to occur at the right time of day for this effect to be noticed.
The system was modified to reject moonrise, went into service, and the Cold War stayed cold until it ended.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The summary should probably mention the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since that's where the link goes and that's who is making the claim.
Expected by those who wanted to test the bombs. Japan was on the brink of surrender, and it's people were beginning to starve. Despite the propaganda, no country fights to the last man.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You all realize this is from a commits anti-america hate group. The stories a mix of half truths to convince the dolts.
The Green Peace FOIA's that I worked on for release while in the Air Force stationed at ACC during the 90's are a better source of information.
Yee haw
Why you don't follow orders blindly. Thanks buddy
They thought it was a good idea because Hitler, and because Tojo. Read your history. I know it's all cool and stuff to be completely ignorant of history and cry in your soymilk about anything nuclear, but there actually were some very good reasons to develop these, followed by very good reasons to drop them on the Japanese, followed by very good reasons to build up an arsenal of them.
Would the world be, have been, better off without war and the various weapons of war? Sure. But see, that's not an option unless everyone is willing to play that way. We're nowhere near that yet, nor have we ever been near that.
how is it a failure of the failsafe for accidental launch? Sounds like they really did want to launch, and those clowns at Okinawa defied them and should have been courtmarshalled.
Expected by those who wanted to test the bombs. Japan was on the brink of surrender, and it's people were beginning to starve. Despite the propaganda, no country fights to the last man.
The massive civilian suicides on Okinawa in the face of defeat, and the repeated suicidal attacks by the military in the face of defeat and throughout the war, indicate that things were not that simple.
Surrender was only a consideration by *some* diplomats and politicians, and they kept their opinions very close and lived in fear of assassination by the militarists. Even the emperor's surrender announcement, which was an absolute game changer, was nearly prevented as military units mutinied and attacked the imperial palace in an attempt to remove the emperor from the corrupting influence of "cowards and traitors" that were misleading him. They nearly found and would have destroyed the emperor's surrender recording. The vast majority of the military was ready to face US landings and to oppose them and to have massive assistance from civilians to resists US forces as they moved inland. Even the atomic bombings did little to change this. The military was telling civilians how wearing white sheets helped protect them from the flash of the new atomic bombs. I believe some Japanese war plans called for the use of chemical weapons on US landing forces.
Surrender was an option to a fearful minority in government. Only a fluke of history, the emperor's decision saw their path adopted. Given the actual evidence available to the US, invasion or blockade were the only two likely non-atomic paths, either risking millions of civilians. Note that the firebombing would have continued during a blockade and such firebombing inflicted far more casualties than the atomic bombings.
Your basic premise fails due to its assumption of rational actors. The militarists of imperial japan were inherently irrational. As navy minister Yamamoto tried to argue against the militarists (primary from the army) with respect to war with the US. He tried to argue manpower and industrial production. He told his subordinates that all his facts and figures were dismissed by the militarists as irrelevant, that the "superior fighting spirit" of the japanese soldier will assure ultimate victory. Various assassination attempts were made on Yamamoto for his opposition to alliance with Germany and war with the US. He was actually forced to move his office from town to a battleship. Given the eventual attack on the imperial palace when surrender rumors began to spread it seems little had changed, rational thinking was still not being used. Except for one single person that even the militarists would not oppose, the emperor. Again, surrender was more a lucky fluke of history than any rational working of a government.
1) He made us stupid 2) We have nukes 3) We're still there ERGO God exists ... Frankly, I almost wish I believed in that.
But the reason of 3) is most probably that the redesigning of Hell's gates is still not finished. Still not wide enough for a massive influx.
Truman already had knowledge of intercepted messages indicating that the Japanese were prepared to surrender. Dropping the bombs on two civilian populations was wholly unnecessary.
Japan was **not** prepared to surrender. The militarists thought that by inflicting severe casualties upon the US they could force negotiations, an armistice - a cease fire, not a surrender. They wanted to remain in power, have no limitations on their military size and capability, have no occupation and possibly hold on to some of their conquered territory.
When surrender rumors began military units mutinied and attacked the imperial palace in an attempt to remove the emperor from the corrupting influence of "cowards and traitors" that were misleading him. They nearly found and would have destroyed the emperor's surrender recording. The vast majority of the military was ready to face US landings and to oppose them and to have massive assistance from civilians to resists US forces as they moved inland. Even the atomic bombings did little to change this. The military was telling civilians how wearing white sheets helped protect them from the flash of the new atomic bombs. I believe some Japanese war plans called for the use of chemical weapons on US landing forces.
Surrender was an option to a fearful minority in government, diplomats and politicians who kept their opinions very close and lived in fear of assassination by the militarists. Only a fluke of history, the emperor's decision saw their path adopted. Given the actual evidence available to the US, invasion or blockade were the only two likely non-atomic paths, either risking millions of civilians. Note that the firebombing would have continued during a blockade and such firebombing inflicted far more casualties than the atomic bombings.
FTFY.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Amazing we didn't kill ourselves
I wish it were appropriate to use past tense here. Unfortunately, the risk of a launch that is accidental or based on misinterpreted data, and sparks a major nuclear exchange, is about as high today as it ever was.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If that was true, then why did Japan refuse to surrender between the first bomb and the second bomb? Those were 3 days apart and Truman explicitly asked for surrender between the two.
I hate to say it, but this kind of thing happening with our strategic forces is hardly new. There is a book by a hardened anti-nuclear weapon activist named Eric Schloss that goes into a lot of similar incidences over the years. He's obviously got an anti-nuclear agenda so read the book with a grain of salt, but the stories he talks about are true and verifiable.
One such gem: At one point in time, we had a default signal that got broadcast out to all of the strategic warning centers to make sure the emergency alert systems were functioning normally. The test message was the exact same message that got sent out in event of a real nuclear emergency, with one difference. The "test" Message said the equivalent of the following:
000 Nuclear Weapons have been launched at us.
Unfortunately, due to a faulty computer chip on the sending end, one of these 0's computer errored and became a 2. Instead of the regular "test" message that was periodically sent saying "000 Nuclear weapons have been launched at us", a fault with a $.40c chip turned a 0 into a 2 and made it say this:
"200 Nuclear weapons have been launched at us."
Once the error was discovered and the cause of the fault detected, the "test" message was promptly changed afterwards.
This is one example of hundreds of similar incidences, some far more concerning then others, and most of them we don't hear about until decades after the fact. Who knows how many more are out there that have yet to be declassified.
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
Of all the countries that shouldn't be allowed nuclear weapons, the United States should be top of the list. This is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population, and the only country that routinely de-stabilises and terrorises other countries across the world. It doesn't surprise me at all, that this type of incident would happen within the US military - which appears hopelessly unprofessional. It should be remembered that the Cuban missile crisis was caused by the United States putting missiles around Russian borders, provoking Russia. This is just like what they are doing today, with NATO expansionism.
are you sure no country fights to the last man?
look at afghanisatan, they kept fighting and first the french then the sovjets left, they're still fighting and sooner or later the us will leave to
They disobeyed orders.
You can call them heroes if you like. I call them traitors.