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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

27 Oct

Fifty-nine years ago today—October 27, 1962—was arguably the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day when human error and sky-high tensions together nearly started World War III by accident at least three separate times. Here's what happened:

While flying a scheduled Strategic Air Command air-sampling mission out of Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, over the North Pole to collect debris from Soviet atmospheric nuclear tests, Capt. Charles Maultsby’s U-2 accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace for more than an hour …

starting at 8:00am Alaska time (Noon in Washington, DC) because he was blinded by the aurora borealis and unable to navigate accurately using the stars. MiG-19 fighters were scrambled from Pevek Airport on the Chukotka Peninsula at 11:56am EDT (and a little later from Anadyr) …

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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

24 Oct

At 10am EDT today in 1962, the Strategic Air Command increased its alert posture to Defense Condition 2 for the first time in history. B-52 airborne alert missions also increased. All other US armed forces remained at DEFCON 3 (SAC only returned to DEFCON 4 on November 21).

SAC’s 24-hour airborne alert tempo increased rapidly, initially totaling 66 B-52s—28 on the northern route over Canada/Alaska, 36 on the southern route over the Mediterranean/Atlantic, and 2 monitoring the BMEWS radar at Thule, Greenland—supported by dozens of KC-135 tankers.

Each B-52 bomber generally carried either four B28 (maximum yield 1.45 Megatons each), two B15 thermonuclear bombs (yield 3.4 Megatons each), or two B39 thermonuclear bombs (yield 3.8 Megatons each).

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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

22 Oct

Today in 1964 near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the first of two underground nuclear tests were conducted as part of Project Dribble (a joint-DOD-AEC effort under the VELA Uniform program) to ascertain the ability to detect and correctly assess the yield of explosions in salt domes.

The Salmon test, 57 years ago today, involved a 5.3-kiloton device designed by the E.O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory detonated at the bottom of a 2,710-foot shaft drilled into Tatum Salt Dome. Hattiesburg's 400 residents evacuated beforehand (adults were paid $10, children $5).

The shockwave, which lifted the ground in the vicinity of the test site by four inches, was significantly larger than residents had been led to expect. Below, Horace Burge, who lived just two miles away, returns home to inspect the damage to his kitchen.

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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

16 Oct

https://twitter.com/Dimi/status/1449462944891346947

Your periodic reminder that developing and fielding a system to reliably defend against nuclear attacks—should that ever become possible—will always be more complicated, more time consuming, and therefore more expensive than any offensive measures your adversary chooses to take.

https://twitter.com/Dimi/status/1449462944891346947

Offense always has the advantage of going first and choosing the best time and place to strike, while defense has to prepare for all possible modes of attack everywhere. And even a reliable defense system can be overwhelmed by deploying more—and less costly—offensive weapons.

Even if we had the proven technology (and we've been trying for more than 60 years), there is no technological solution to this political problem. That was the wisdom behind the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which President George W. Bush foolishly abandoned 19 years ago.

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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

12 Oct

35 years ago today, unprecedented negotiations in Reykjavik, Iceland, to verifiably eliminate all US and USSR nuclear weapons collapsed when Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s stipulation that research on ballistic missile defenses be confined to laboratories (per the 1972 ABM Treaty).

Gorbachev had proposed and Reagan agreed to dismantling all nuclear weapons over a 10-year period, but Reagan stubbornly insisted there could be no constraints on his Strategic Defense Initiative, which he had been falsely assured was on the verge of a technological breakthrough.

In other words, Reagan put his faith in a dream that _might_ one day render ballistic missiles—and only ballistic missiles—“impotent and obsolete” over a concrete plan to achieve that goal within a decade. Reagan’s dream remains unfulfilled and nuclear weapons are still with us.

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Stephen Schwartz

@AtomicAnalyst

12 Oct

Early today in 1965, at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, this C-124C Globemaster II was being refueled for a routine nuclear logistics mission when the hose was accidentally disconnected. It caught fire and was destroyed. Only the wings and landing gear remained intact.

Numerous nuclear weapons components were consumed in the fire, including 16 B43 Mod 0/1 conversion kits, an inert B53 training unit (photo), two neutron generators, and two tritium reservoirs (photo)—one of which ruptured in the fire, contaminating the aircraft and firefighters.

Firefighters—who were initially unaware nuclear components were aboard—retrieved 140 undamaged neutron generators from the C-124C plus three flatbed truck loads of charred tritium reservoirs. The USAF later misleadingly claimed it carried only a small amount of conventional ammo.

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