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Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
@AtomicAnalyst
Dec 22, 2021 • 10 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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THREAD: Over the years, Santa Claus has had an interesting relationship with nuclear weapons. During World War II—on a visit to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—his sack of toys was subjected to a thorough search before he was allowed to enter the secret city.
In 1955, a misdialed phone number by a Colorado Springs child led a clever colonel at the Continental Air Defense Command—and, later, NORAD—to craft a public relations campaign to protect Santa Claus from godless Soviet communists and normalize nuclear war.gizmodo.com/how-the-u-s-mi…
“When a childish voice asked COC Commander Col. Harry Shoup if there was a Santa Claus at the North Pole, he answered much more roughly than he should …: ‘There may be a guy called Santa Claus at the North Pole, but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.’”
Here’s a staged publicity photograph circa late 1950s to 1960s of two Air Force enlisted men “tracking” Santa’s sleigh at NORAD, or possibly at a SAGE air defense radar site.
In the early 1960s, Santa even gave the US Air Force a brand new liquid-fueled Titan I ICBM armed with a 4.5-Megaton W38 warhead (for use against the especially naughty?).
On October 28, 1961—two days before the Soviet Union conducted its much-publicized test of a massive 50-Megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Arctic—President John F. Kennedy tried to reassure Miss Michelle Rochon of Marine City, Michigan, that “you must not worry about Santa Claus.”
Here is the backstory to Michelle’s letter and Kennedy’s response: washingtonpost.com/history/2019/1…
From 1964-70, the @AFmuseum in Dayton, Ohio, decorated its retired Atlas D ICBM (which once carried a W49 1.4-Megaton warhead) as Santa Claus. Ho-ho-holocaust!
In 2013, in an unusual joint venture, the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant in Russia and Grandfather Frost (Santa Claus) announced the deployment of the new Supersonic Low-Earth Intercontinental Gift Hauler (SLEIGH).
(Just kidding. That photo was actually tweeted by then-Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dimitry Rogzin sarcastically wishing a happy new year “to our NATO friends!” I coined the acronym a few years later. Sadly, Rogozin’s tweet was deleted sometime in 2020.)

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More from @AtomicAnalyst

Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Oct 3, 2023
Today in 1986, 680 miles NE of Bermuda, the Soviet Yankee 1-class ballistic missile submarine K-219 was on patrol when seawater leaked into a missile tube, triggering an explosion of the missile’s volatile liquid fuel that killed three sailors and crippled the submarine.


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Under very dangerous conditions, the crew managed to shut down the submarine’s reactors and stabilize it. Captain Igor Britanov was ordered to have the K-219 towed by freighter 4,300 miles to its homeport of Gadzhiyevo (near Murmansk), but it flooded and sank three days later. Image
The K-219—including its two nuclear reactors, 16 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and 32-48 thermonuclear warheads—sank in 18,000 feet of water to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain. Image
Read 10 tweets
Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Sep 29, 2023
This afternoon in 1957, in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-65 near Kyshtym in the Southern Urals, a stainless steel tank holding 70-80 tons of highly-radioactive waste left over from processing plutonium for nuclear weapons exploded, releasing 20 million curies of radioactivity. Image
While the explosion was chemical in nature (much of the liquid waste evaporated over time, leaving behind a volatile dry mixture of sodium nitrate and sodium acetate), a brief nuclear criticality may have initiated it. The explosion’s size has been estimated at 5-100 tons of TNT.
The explosion completely destroyed the tank and damaged two adjacent ones. About 90 percent of the radioactive waste fell to the ground in the immediate vicinity of the tank, while about 10 percent was lofted by the wind in a plume up to 1 kilometer high and 300 kilometers long. Image
Read 9 tweets
Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Sep 19, 2023
Today in 1980 at about 3:00am, the highly-volatile liquid fuel of a nuclear-armed Titan II ICBM exploded inside an underground silo 3.3 miles north-northeast of Damascus, Arkansas, and approximately 50 miles north of the capital of Little Rock, destroying the missile and silo.

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The explosion—which occurred more than 8 hours after a worker accidentally dropped a large socket, puncturing a fuel tank—killed Sr. Airman David Livingston, 22, destroyed the missile and silo, and hurled its 9-Mt W53 warhead through the 740-ton silo doors and ~100 feet away.


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Note also the unintentionally ironic, below-the-fold headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that day, beneath the article about the catastrophic accident: “Would Use A-Bomb If Necessary To Defend U.S., Carter Warns.” Image
Read 7 tweets
Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Sep 17, 2023
Today in 1955, a specially-modified B-36 bomber—the NB-36H—made its first test flight out of Carswell AFB, Texas, carrying (but not powered by) an operational 1-Megawatt air-cooled nuclear reactor. It would make 46 additional flights over Texas and New Mexico through March 1957. Image
The NB-36H flew directly over Lake Worth, the principal water source for Fort Worth. A B-50 carrying specially-trained paratroopers escorted each test flight. Had the NB-36H crashed, they would jump into the impact zone to prevent any unauthorized entry.
A 12-ton lead-and-rubber-shielded cockpit with windows 10-12 inches thick protected the flight crew from the otherwise lethal amount of radiation emanating from the reactor hanging in the bomb bay. Special water pockets installed aft of the cockpit also absorbed radiation.
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Read 20 tweets
Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Sep 14, 2023
OTD in 1954—for its ninth nuclear test—the USSR staged a live-fire nuclear wargame ~600 mi. SE of Moscow near Totskoye. At 9:33am (local), a 40-kt atomic bomb exploded 1,150 feet in the air between two groups of soldiers, some just 2 miles from the blast.
The roughly 45,000 soldiers were then ordered into mock battle under highly radioactive conditions for the remainder of the day. Most had no protective equipment and were not warned about the dangers. Some who were issued gas masks removed them in the oppressive 115F (46C) heat.
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Exposures that day were reportedly ten times the maximum allowable level for US soldiers for an entire year. The 1,000,000 people who lived within 100 miles of the blast were given no warning at all. For more about this “monstrous” exercise, see: washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
Read 10 tweets
Stephen Schwartz Profile picture
Sep 11, 2023
On September 11, 2001, US Strategic Command was one week into its annual Global Guardian nuclear command and control exercise. Bombers had been armed with nuclear weapons, ICBMs and several SSBNs were on alert, and three E-4B command posts were airborne. omaha.com/local/on-strat…
Which is why, when Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana (taking President George W. Bush from Sarasota, Florida, to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, and, eventually, back to Washington, DC), this is the first thing that happened: politico.com/magazine/story…
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In 2016, @warkin and @rwindrem reported that three dozen live nuclear weapons were loaded aboard strategic bombers at three US Air Force bases that day. The other bases were almost certainly Minot AFB in North Dakota and Whiteman AFB in Missouri. nbcnews.com/storyline/9-11…
Read 9 tweets

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