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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.