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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.
"Solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) figured out it was a flare that caused the outages, not the Soviets."
At which point the United States declared war on the Sun and began its long war to liberate space. 'MERICA!
U.S. veterans reveal 1962 nuclear close call dodged in Okinawa
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At the final moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the U.S. nuclear missile men in Okinawa received a launch order which was later found to have been mistakenly issued, according to testimonies by former U.S. veterans given to Kyodo News.
In the fall of 1962, the Soviet Union introduced nuclear missiles into Cuba from where Moscow could target the mainland of the United States. U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his top advisers then seriously considered military options as a countermeasure, and the two superpowers were on the brink of nuclear exchanges.
The testimonies by the veterans, who gazed into the "abyss" of a nuclear war, shed new historical light on a nuclear close call which could have triggered the use of nuclear weapons, highlighting the potential risk of an accidental nuclear launch.
According to John Bordne, 73, former member of the 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, several hours after his crew took over a midnight shift from 12 a.m. on Oct. 28 in 1962 at the Missile Launch Control Center at Yomitan Village in Okinawa, a coded order to launch missiles was conveyed in a radio communication message from the Missile Operations Center at the Kadena Air Base.
Another former U.S. veteran who served in Okinawa also recently confirmed on condition of anonymity what Bordne told Kyodo News in an interview last summer and in following e-mail exchanges. Bordne has mentioned the incident in an unpublished memoir based on his diary.
Eight "Martin Marietta Mace B" nuclear cruise missiles were deployed at that time at the Yomitan missile site, called "Site One Bolo Point" by U.S. military personnel. Bordne, who currently lives in Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, was one of seven crew members there.
There were a total of four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point. Each site had eight missiles which were commanded and controlled by the Missile Operations Center at Kadena.
The main daily mission of Bordne, one of the flight-control specialists called Mech2, was to maintain the ready-to-launch status of Mace B missiles. Normally, once they started an eight-hour shift at the site, they "recycled" a missile, meaning powering down a missile, checking parts of the warhead, nosecone and flight control systems and returning it to ready-to-launch status.
"Oh, my God!," Bordne recalled his colleagues as saying as they turned white with shock and surprise when they received a launch order before dawn on Oct. 28. The order was issued from Kadena to all four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point, he said.
According to him, the three-level confirmation process was taken step-by-step in accordance with a manual by comparing codes in the launch order and codes given to his crew team in advance. All of the codes matched.
"So, we read the targets out loud. Out of the four missiles, we had only one headed toward Russia. The other three were not going to Russia. That, right away, gave us a start to wonder. Because the launch directive said you launch all the missiles," Bordne said. His crew team was in charge of four out of eight missiles deployed at the site.
"And we figured, 'Why hit these other countries?' They've got nothing to do with this. That doesn't make any sense," Bordne said. "So, our captain, the launch officer, said to us 'We've got to think this through in a logical, rational manner'."
When the launch order was issued, the five-level "DEFCON" scale, or defense condition, remained at level 2, one step from starting a war. Theoretically, a launch order should not be issued unless DEFCON is raised to 1, which means initiating a military counterattack against enemy forces.
The order under DEFCON 2 made the crew team, especially the launch officer, so dubious about its authenticity that the officer ordered suspen
Stories have a way of evolving over time. The cold war was a time of great uncertainty, fear, and distrust. The US and the Soviets were both very uncertain about the technical capabilities of each other. The realities of WWII were still fresh in the minds of many. So when something like this occurred that was not understood, defense mechanisms were kicked into action.
But that does not mean we were ready to push the button or we would have if some scientists hadn't stepped in. It seems that we went through a process of evaluating all of the possibilities, and with the insight of the space program contributors to that process we figured out the cause, and it happened fairly quickly.
I'm sure that over the years some of those scientists liked to tell the story of how they saved the day. And its inevitable that over time the implication of how close we were to pushing the button was enhanced to make the story more interesting. But reality is often a bit more boring and the most likely reality is that we were still early in the process of evaluating the situation and only taking preliminary defensive actions.
Its an interesting story nonetheless, but time has its way of dramatizing things.
It did not almost start a nuclear war. The system back then was actually better thought out than the one we have today. The DEW line was "jammed". If the military really thought that it was the soviets then the alert bombers would have been launched and would have flown to the failsafe line then gone back to base.
No war.
The most you can say is that the US considered launching it's alert bombers to the failsafe line.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
>Sorry, can you outline how many fly overs the russians made vs how many the americans did?
I don't ordinarily respond to cowards but this really needs addressing.
The Russians didn't fly over the U.S. for two reasons. One, they didn't have U2 or SR71 technology so they couldn't do flyovers without getting shot down. Two they didn't need to. Russia had entire cities that foreigners weren't allowed to travel. We on the other hand only restricted access to military bases. Hell, Khrushchev rode a train through one of our nuclear missile bases when he toured the U.S.
The USSR was a huge entity spanning 11 time zones so missiles in Turkey weren't anywhere near as threatening to Moscow as Cuban missiles were to Miami. Nonetheless, Kennedy agreed to remove them in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing their missiles from Cuba.