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So, uh, it looks like we may have come closer to nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis than we though. And I'm not talking about the incident with the Russian sub.quote:John Bordne, a resident of Blakeslee, Penn., had to keep a personal history to himself for more than five decades. Only recently has the US Air Force given him permission to tell the tale, which, if borne out as true, would constitute a terrifying addition to the lengthy and already frightening list of mistakes and malfunctions that have nearly plunged the world into nuclear war. This comes after the recently declassified intelligence white paper that analyzed Able Archer 83, perhaps the closest time the US and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. These articles and papers are only the latest in a series of recently declassified Cold War era documents which have revealed poor management of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, most notably in Eric Schlosser's Command and Control, which focused in part on the 1980 explosion of a nuclear-tipped Titan II missile. But mishaps with our arsenal (called Bent Spear or Broken Arrow incidents when a nuclear weapon is involved) have not ended with the Cold War, including a 2007 incident in which six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were flown on a B-52 bomber from North Dakota to Louisiana without anyone noticing that the missing warheads were on the bomber. Our missile systems seem to be fairing no better, with reports of morale problems leading to widespread cheating on tests meant to evaluate competency and proficiency with their launch systems. Does the US have a problem with caring for its nuclear weapons? Is it possible to be more careful with them? Or is an accidental nuclear detonation inevitable if we don't push for full disarmament now? And what, if anything, can/must us responsible citizens do about this? Please feel free to use this topic to discuss any other related topics to nuclear arms, including British debates about Trident, the risks of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India, and whatever little bits we know about Russian nuclear weapons (Dead Hand, and so on), though it would be nice to avoid conspiracy theories. It would also be nice if we can avoid making this about Iranian nukes, but I recognize that such discussion is inevitable, so feel free to bring it up if you feel it's appropriate, though please remember that this thread is meant to be broader than just one country's program.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:31
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Finally, we have a nuclear-derail deterrent. Being fair this isn't the only time a nuclear disaster almost occurred - Britain's Trident had a panic after our method of determining if the UK is still standing (BBC Radio 4 is still broadcasting) had an interruption of the signal, leading to the sub leadership nervously preparing to MAD-destruct whoever-got-us.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:39
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Tesseraction posted:Finally, we have a nuclear-derail deterrent. They should really put that on the station somewhere. "Radio 4: Listen to us or die in nuclear fire."
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Oct 26, 2015 22:41
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"Radio 4: without us Amsterdam would be radioactive ash."
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Oct 26, 2015 22:41
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sigh maybe theyll get it right next time 
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Oct 26, 2015 22:43
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http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ World War 2 ended with Einstein being proven correct (relativity used to be quite controversial, the Nazis saw his work as part of the Jewish conspiracy) We need a true war to end all wars. People don't really understand the power and responsibility of technological civilization - you can make an example of ISIL and hopefully set us down the road to technology-sharing and disarmament.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:49
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quote:According to Bordne's account—which, recall, is based on hearing just one side of a phone call—the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles! Bassett immediately ordered the other launch officer, as Bordne remembers it, “to send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.” About 30 yards of underground tunnel separated the two Launch Control Centers. Jesus. I really hope that there is some kind of exaggeration here. Maybe the Lt. was just pointing out policy or guidelines and wasn't actually threatening to follow through with it.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:52
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We had a Spaceballs level launch code for a while as well. As pointed out in the article the code was meant as a safety lock out and wasn't a main launch code. Several years ago, the general in charge of the Air Force nuclear program was fired due to several drunken incidents, including one in Russia during which he got wasted and dragged an entire envoy to a bar to see a Beatles cover band and then crashed the stage to sing along. Reportedly even the Russians (!) were embarrassed by how drunk he was.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:56
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nowhinezone posted:We had a Spaceballs level launch code for a while as well. John Oliver is, of course, required watching. (He goes into detail about the cheating missileers)
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Oct 26, 2015 23:06
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Finally, a thread for me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AJPpHnBJiY A small documentary on ICBM/ABM development. Check out the documentary "Trinity and Beyond" for a good primer on US nuclear weapons development.
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Oct 26, 2015 23:13
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And the day before on the 27th, the captain of a Soviet attack submarine cruising near Cuba thought that war had broken out and was ready to start shooting nuclear torpedoes at a US carrier group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov
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Oct 27, 2015 00:19
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C.M. Kruger posted:And the day before on the 27th, the captain of a Soviet attack submarine cruising near Cuba thought that war had broken out and was ready to start shooting nuclear torpedoes at a US carrier group. Thank goodness a cooler head prevailed.
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Oct 27, 2015 00:21
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http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?t=a72674880d83e3c49b6699e50a55db77 1.5 Million Dead - a wall of fire and ash unlike anything from the old books. A clear choice in the aftermath - swords or plows
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Oct 27, 2015 00:36
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For a bit of non-near-apocalypse history, I saw a lecture tonight on Project Sapphire, which was a covert mission to recover/downblend nuclear weapons material from Kazakhstan after the dissolution of the Soviet Union - part of a larger effort to secure nuclear material from former Soviet states. The speaker's perspective was specifically IAEA safeguards and material accountancy and it sounds like they did a pretty good job there as far as controls go. For this type of situation, the biggest concerns are material theft and criticality safety, so there's a lot of process management to ensure that nothing is going missing and that you don't cause a criticality accident. I'm actually taking graduate classes on nuclear weapons effects and nuclear politics in the middle east at the moment so good timing on this thread. Just off the top of my head, here's some recommended reading if you're interested in nuclear weapons: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, this is a classic telling of how the bomb was developed, starting with the scientific developments of the late 19th/early 20th century. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Samuel Glasstone and Phillip Dolan, this is a technical guide to what happens when a nuclear bomb is detonated, with tons of graphs and tables. It describes how to calculate the extent of pretty much all the effects, from the prompt gammas to the fireball and the crater, etc. This book is actually cited several times in the FAQ for the NUKEMAP linked by McDowell. This really is the go-to text for calculating nuclear weapons effects. If you want a sort of quick and dirty but technical guide to the theory behind a nuclear bomb, read The Los Alamos Primer, which has been required reading in at least 3 of my classes. I especially recommend this if you have a technical background and a decent grasp of geometry/kinematics. Very quick read. I can probably also give recommendations on specific topics of people are interested. Nuclear weapons and their history are really interesting because on the one hand, it shows our capacity for amazing ingenuity and genius when we really need it; on the other hand, it shows our terrible incompetence when managing such a large responsibility and sometimes apocalyptic situations are avoided by sheer luck. I guess that's just humanity! Phayray fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 02:43
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Good job getting the Maiden reference wrong in the thread title OP. 
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Oct 27, 2015 02:50
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C. Everett Koop posted:Good job getting the Maiden reference wrong in the thread title OP. I'm glad I'm not the only one who was mad at that.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:37
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Lawman 0 posted:I'm glad I'm not the only one who was mad at that. The doomsday clock at thebulletin.org (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) is currently standing at 3 minutes, representing a very high risk of nuclear war and now unchecked global warming. We only hit 2 minutes in the early parts of the Cold War.
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Oct 27, 2015 12:23
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Can nuclear winter reverse global warming?
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Oct 27, 2015 19:22
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Arglebargle III posted:Can nuclear winter reverse global warming? It would have the same sort of catastrophic effects on agriculture that we do not desire. A lot of climate change research was influenced by studies on nuclear winter.
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Oct 27, 2015 19:23
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C. Everett Koop posted:Good job getting the Maiden reference wrong in the thread title OP. Lawman 0 posted:I'm glad I'm not the only one who was mad at that. 1337JiveTurkey posted:The doomsday clock at thebulletin.org (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) is currently standing at 3 minutes, representing a very high risk of nuclear war and now unchecked global warming. We only hit 2 minutes in the early parts of the Cold War. Oh huh, I never knew the meaning of the Maiden song title - I'd assumed it was like the '40 minutes to launch a WMD' claim about Iraq in the lead-up to the war. Always figured Saddam's WMD was just too slapdash to match cold war missile speeds.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:08
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Until I knew about the doomsday clock I always thought it alluded to the supposed two-minute warning we'd get if the nukes started flying.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:12
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TomViolence posted:Until I knew about the doomsday clock I always thought it alluded to the supposed two-minute warning we'd get if the nukes started flying. 15 minute warning. We'd know when the missiles come over the Pole, and then have 15 minutes to react before they'd hit. We'd have less time if it was Submarine based.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:14
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We'd have better reaction times if we could move our pole closer to Russia, but he got too cold.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:39
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Arglebargle III posted:We'd have better reaction times if we could move our pole closer to Russia, but he got too cold. We have limited Pole resources for such things.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:40
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Tesseraction posted:Oh huh, I never knew the meaning of the Maiden song title - I'd assumed it was like the '40 minutes to launch a WMD' claim about Iraq in the lead-up to the war. Always figured Saddam's WMD was just too slapdash to match cold war missile speeds. You haven't read Alan Moore's 'Watchmen'!?!
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Oct 27, 2015 21:49
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Arglebargle III posted:We'd have better reaction times if we could move our pole closer to Russia, but he got too cold. We must not allow a permafrost gap.
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Oct 28, 2015 08:48
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Isn't it kind of hosed up that nuclear weapons, ie the most destructive weapons around, are the only ones for which one of the stated purposes is to target civilian centers and commit horrible crimes against humanity? That's what makes me dislike them so much.
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Oct 28, 2015 09:01
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Isn't it kind of hosed up that nuclear weapons, ie the most destructive weapons around, are the only ones for which one of the stated purposes is to target civilian centers and commit horrible crimes against humanity? Ah, they share that distinction with biological weapons, not that it's unreasonable to detest those too.
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Oct 28, 2015 09:04
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I know the ranges involved aren't quite the same (unless you're talking exclusively about Chinese rather than including Russian targets as well, in which case they're nigh identical), but America nearly starting a nuclear exchange over Russia putting missiles in Cuba while already having a comparable first strike base secretly stashed away in Okinawa is some loving world class hypocrisy. What the hell good even is a secret first strike base? How does it deter anyone from anything if you don't tell anyone it exists!? (jk, I'm pretty sure I know the answer is "it's not intended as a deterrent, because if anyone knew about it they'd rightly kick up as big a stink as America did over Cuba, it's there so we can pretend to ourselves that we've got the edge needed to win at global thermonuclear holocaust")
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Oct 28, 2015 09:28
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Precisely. The idea is to kill the bastards. If there's one Russian and two Americans left, we won.
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Oct 28, 2015 10:25
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Isn't it kind of hosed up that nuclear weapons, ie the most destructive weapons around, are the only ones for which one of the stated purposes is to target civilian centers and commit horrible crimes against humanity? They are also the only things that have kept us from another major conflict.
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Oct 28, 2015 12:07
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That's not even remotely true. The second world war has just skewed your perception of what counts as major.
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Oct 28, 2015 12:18
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Saying MAD has kept us from having a war as destructive as, or more destructive than WW2 seems pretty accurate. Not that it has prevented major regional conflicts.
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Oct 28, 2015 12:42
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crabcakes66 posted:Saying MAD has kept us from having a war as destructive as, or more destructive than WW2 seems pretty accurate. It is accurate to say that we have not had a war that massive since getting nukes. Attributing a causal relationship here is very much a tiger-repelling rock type thing, especially since (as with the rock) the people pushing the narrative that nukes prevent war are the same people selling the nukes. I mean, maybe they've helped? But honestly looking at all the near misses it seems much more likely that world war three has failed to occur in spite of, rather than thanks to, nukes. Renaissance Robot fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 12:59
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CommieGIR posted:15 minute warning. We have better warning than that now because of the GPS constellation. Besides its best known purpose, the satellites also have highly sensitive thermal cameras capable of detecting ballistic missile launches. Because ICBMs need to accelerate so quickly, they leave a massive exhaust plume which is detectable from space.
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Oct 28, 2015 13:22
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Renaissance Robot posted:It is accurate to say that we have not had a war that massive since getting nukes. Attributing a causal relationship here is very much a tiger-repelling rock type thing, especially since (as with the rock) the people pushing the narrative that nukes prevent war are the same people selling the nukes. I'm not sure it's a causal relationship. It seems pretty clear that without nukes NATO and the USSR would have gone at it at some point.
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Oct 28, 2015 13:23
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Renaissance Robot posted:I know the ranges involved aren't quite the same (unless you're talking exclusively about Chinese rather than including Russian targets as well, in which case they're nigh identical), but America nearly starting a nuclear exchange over Russia putting missiles in Cuba while already having a comparable first strike base secretly stashed away in Okinawa is some loving world class hypocrisy. Never mind Okinawa, America had ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, the latter of which literally shared a border with the USSR. That's why the USSR wanted its own in Cuba, to even things up.
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Oct 28, 2015 13:32
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CommieGIR posted:15 minute warning. For values of 'we' equivalent to America. Not so much over here in 
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Oct 28, 2015 13:33
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I can see how MAD very probably prevented a war between the USSR and the US, but I'm not that confident it would stop a WW1-style slide into war where interlocking alliances blow a tiny event into one with global consequences. Reading Command and Control made me develop full-bore nucleomituphobia, which you can read about in my E/N thread on the subject should you want to for some unimaginable reason. It wasn't so much the endless list of narrowly-averted disasters that set me off as the realisation that I hadn't really appreciated nuclear weapons were real on a visceral level, and the subsequent realisation that noone around me really did, either. The extent to which a possible – potentially likely – future event inhabits the same kind of mind space among the public as zombies and aliens do bothers me to the point that I think about it more or less all the time.
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Oct 28, 2015 14:05
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Renaissance Robot posted:That's not even remotely true. The second world war has just skewed your perception of what counts as major. We spent nearly 50 years itching for a war with the USSR that never came thanks to MAD. feedmegin posted:Never mind Okinawa, America had ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, the latter of which literally shared a border with the USSR. That's why the USSR wanted its own in Cuba, to even things up. Those were so out of date, its part of why Khrushchev's Cuba policy was so laughable: He withdrew missiles in Cuba in trade for withdrawls of US missiles in Turkey and Italy, but we really were not giving anything up, ICBMs had replaced the IRBMs long before that happened, so it was going to happen anyways. crabcakes66 posted:I'm not sure it's a causal relationship. Nearly the entirety of Soviet planning and US planning was a dance around how to avoid starting a nuclear war while at the same time being able to fight a conventional. 1337JiveTurkey posted:We have better warning than that now because of the GPS constellation. Besides its best known purpose, the satellites also have highly sensitive thermal cameras capable of detecting ballistic missile launches. Because ICBMs need to accelerate so quickly, they leave a massive exhaust plume which is detectable from space.  GPS has NUCLEAR detonation detectors, the missile blooms are detected by other satellites, specifically SBIRS and SEWS.Renaissance Robot posted:It is accurate to say that we have not had a war that massive since getting nukes. Attributing a causal relationship here is very much a tiger-repelling rock type thing, especially since (as with the rock) the people pushing the narrative that nukes prevent war are the same people selling the nukes. Even counting Vietnam and the Korean War, our conflicts have been steadily declining in size and human toll. At least between Superpowers. But yes, MAD has not done anything to stop regional conflicts that are indirectly influenced by said superpowers.
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Oct 28, 2015 14:40
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