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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.
The first 32 aren't so bad. It's the next 1,000 that *really* ruin your day.
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.
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
That seems like a reasonable deterrent. How else would we stop the Cuban software?
-Dave
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
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....
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.
I'm guessing it's a bit of both... Something dangerous happened and many of the safeties where disabled, but the true story isn't as bad as this sounds.
As close as we where to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile crisis (and we where close) and as bad as the technical faults may have been or not, it didn't happen. I'd like to point out that for each of these "We almost launched" stories we have on this side, there are at least as many on the other side, even during this crisis, yet nobody has died during a mistaken nuclear explosion since WW2.
The guys/gals in the silos have procedures they follow and that is EXACTLY what they do, usually without exception. Even today, where being in the missile service is seen as a dead end and morale is lower than the bottom of the silos, if the launch order really shows up, you can bet the majority would do their jobs and launch. There is no way that during the Cuban missile crisis, when the safeties where off and launch orders where on a hair trigger that a *mistaken* launch order would have been ignored/disobeyed by the whole missile squadron following their procedures.
So, one can safely conclude that the procedures where followed and they had the desired result of preventing unauthorized unintended launches, even in the face of high tension and danger between two superpowers.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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.
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.
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
Without commenting on the veracity of the story, the missiles in questions were Mace missiles, which, like the Regulus, Bomarc, et. al. were what we today call cruise missiles. So a "silo" is likely to be more like a building than an ICBM silo. They even had Regulus silos on submarines.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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
... Lincoln was a two bit lawyer with zero experience that many believed was largely responsible for the Civil War. He took the highest office of a deeply divided country and it literally fell apart under his leadership. As a leader, he failed in his first term and almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term. Yet we remember him as a leader, as an important part of the Civil War, one of the BEST presidents on record.
What bizarrely ignorant claptrap!
Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861. By that date seven of the eleven states of Confederacy had already seceded (with the secession process in full swing the last four); the CSA government had already been declared, and the first hostilities of the war (by the South) had already occurred when South Carolina fired on the Star of the West that was resupplying Ft. Sumter, which was under siege, on 9 January 1861.
Very odd notion of a "failed first term". When Lincoln was re-elected the western half of the Confederacy had been defeated, and the last remaining Confederate army of any strength (Lee's army) was pinned down, unable to move or act against the Union in any way, was shrinking through desertion, and was only five months from final surrender. Basically the war was already won, it was then only a matter of time to get the defeated to lay down their arms.
Lincoln had also abolished slavery in fact everywhere in the Confederacy where Union troops had set foot (most of it), and gotten the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery everywhere, completely, passed by the Senate, and well on the way to ratification.
Oh, and his diplomacy had kept even a single nation anywhere in the world from recognizing the Confederacy.
And his first term wasn't even all about the war either. He had gotten the Pacific Railroad Bill passed in July 1862, that set in motion the transcontinental railroad project that would unite the two coasts of America by rail in 1869.
The bit about "almost didn't win the primary to be elected to his second term" is truly bizarre. First, there were no primaries. Second, the challenger to Lincoln - Salmon P. Chase - withdrew in March and Lincoln faced no opposition when he was renominated in June. He won the election 212-21. If by "almost didn't win" you meant "easily crushed all opposition" then you would be far closer to the truth.
Please cite who these "many" are that think he was "largely responsible for the Civil War".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Napoleon can be chalked up as a failure of logistics. The doctrine of the time was that your armies relied heavily on plundered resources for their sustenance. That doctrine was especially important given the distances involved in invading Russia. The Russians denied Napoleon that strategy and it all went south from there.
Hitler was stopped in Russia because Stalin basically decided to just poor conscripts into the fight as long as it took to choke the German offensive. If Hitler had actually been able to bring all of his might to that fight he might have won anyways, as it was his armies were split fighting and holding conquered ground all over Europe and Africa.
If NATO went after Russia, instead of having the army of any one single nation to fight, they'd have several major nations and many smaller ones to fend off. Those nations would likely not have large portions of their military busy elsewhere. And they'd have the support of modern logistics where you don't have to worry about salting the earth strategies.
Air power would likely be a huge factor, and I don't know who would win on that front initially. But I'm pretty sure that NATO would have the better ability to sustain that kind of war and eventually win through attrition in the same way the Russians won at Stalingrad. Stealth fighters from my understanding are essentially a dead end though. Drones in an Anti Aircraft role would probably be more important.
I'm not sure how affected by cold temperatures tanks and other ground level stuff would be, the USA has been building and testing equipment for that purpose in Alaska for decades though. Aircraft would likely not be affected at all though, they are designed to function at such an altitude that the ground temps aren't really important. And it's not like those aircraft would be based out of conquered Russian territory anyways, they'd be flying sorties in from well behind any lines of battle.
Anyways, it's not like this is a situation unique to Russia, they just have a history of resisting invasion. The USA would face and ultimately crumble under the same kind of situation where it to face a significant portion of the industrialized world coming after it with torches and pitchforks. That is after all why the USA went all out in WW2 once the realization was made that we couldn't hope to win/survive by being isolationists.
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.
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.
From the perspective of the South, the Election of Lincoln was the trigger that ignited the war. He was a Republican, which had at it's core two fundamental beliefs that where antithetical to life in the South. The position that Slavery was wrong and should be made illegal and that the southern states who where threatening to leave the union over the first issue should not be allowed to leave. This is why many of the southern states left the union AFTER Lincoln was president-elect but before he took office. They knew what was coming, Lincoln was going to be president and we will be loosing our way of life if he and his party have their way.
From the North's perspective.... Most of what you said is true.. However, The first election was razor close, with the electoral college split FOUR ways, with the South's choice taking 55 electoral votes for Breckenridge. .It's instructive to pay attention to the popular vote, which with over 80% of voters casting ballots, Lincoln took just less than 500,000 more votes out of about 4.5 Million over his nearest competitor. It was close, and Lincoln was NOT well supported but would become president over a deeply divided country.
In the second election There was a nomination fight, though brief, where the leaders of his own party questioned his position. He largely ran unopposed in the north but Had the south been voting in the second election his margin of victory would have been thinner than his first election. He won with 55% of the popular vote his second time out, but with only Northern votes and with less margin over his single rival.
But my point it all that is that Lincoln was not universally recognized as a good leader, mostly until AFTER his death. He was reviled and savaged in the press of his day, even in the north by Confederates and Abolitionists alike. Plus, I'm trying to make the point that Lincoln was decidedly NOT recognized a an effective leader, but had many who thought him very wrong with at least one member of his cabinet tendering his resignation over the emaciation proclamation and his own party being generally opposed to this and his handling of the war. You see, for the bulk of the war, the North was loosing, loosing materials, men and battles one after another until Gettysburg. This was true for *most* of his first term and only near the end of his term, during the election, did the North start seeing success in the bloody scary war, Especially in the east.
His position as a leader was not firmly established prior to his taking office nor before his re-election as president. Nobody really expected that much from the lowly businessman, lawyer turned politician with nearly zero success in just about all he touched from Illinois. Yet, he turned out to be much more, even more than his shocking martyrdom in office might elicit. He arose to the occasion, having taking the presidency in a 4 way battle, without the majority's support, during an exceedingly difficult time and transformed himself into a principled leader, now remembered and admired for what he accomplished. But nobody really expected Lincoln's presidency to amount to much when it started.
My point is that leaders have historically been much like Lincoln; Leaders who nobody expected to amount to much, rising to the occasion, becoming the very leaders necessary for the times, much to the surprise of all.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.