How a 1967 Solar Storm Nearly Led To Nuclear War (space.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Space.com: A powerful solar storm nearly heated the Cold War up catastrophically a half century ago, a new study suggests. The U.S. Air Force began preparing for war on May 23, 1967, thinking that the Soviet Union had jammed a set of American surveillance radars. But military space-weather forecasters intervened in time, telling top officials that a powerful sun eruption was to blame, according to the study. "Had it not been for the fact that we had invested very early on in solar and geomagnetic storm observations and forecasting, the impact [of the storm] likely would have been much greater," Delores Knipp, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "This was a lesson learned in how important it is to be prepared." Initially, it was assumed that the Soviet Union was to blame. Since radar jamming is considered an act of war, "commanders quickly began preparing nuclear-weapon-equipped aircraft for launch." Spoiler: Solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) figured out it was a flare that caused the outages, not the Soviets. You can read the abstract of the paper for free here.

Comments

Re:Odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently flying spy planes over Russia is also not an act of war, but if Russia did the same thing would it be equally acceptable?

And they've blown a U-2 out of the air. Apparently you know very little about how the game is played.

It is also interesting how often we hear about "Russian incompetence" and "close calls" but not so much about US incompetence, lost weapons, accidents, etc.

Uhm.. it has it has been documented. I know somebody involved in one of the incidents, and his career didn't go very far after the fuckup... but then again, I get it: you just want to piss and moan about the US.

So, nowadays we have a re-emboldened Russia fucking around in Crimea and Ukraine knocking on Europe's door (make no mistake, a Western Europe with no US-backed NATO would be absolutely fucked), and China constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Here's my attitude, motherfucker: you can't handle the truth.