It is nothing short of a miracle that we have not yet fallen to a nuclear catastrophe. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of course very close, with military advisors on both sides pushing for strikes. A more disturbing (IMO) tempting of fate was the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident [1], where soviet defense systems detected incoming ICBMs from the US. Protocol dictates launching retaliatory nuclear strikes, but the Soviet colonel at the early warning system, Stanislav Petrov, deemed it to be a false alarm, which it ultimately was. Had he followed orders, we would have experienced a full scale nuclear war.
Perhaps more upsetting is the number of nuclear catastrophes the US nearly inflicted on itself. The incident in the TFA is just one of several such incidents arising from a single Cold War Air Force program: Operation Chrome Dome [2]. The US would fly multiple bombers carrying up to four thermonuclear bombs in a loop from Texas eastward over the Atlantic up to Greenland then west and south over Canada back to the PNW US. Everyday we had bombers above us, and some of those days they accidentally dropped nukes on us. Two on North Carolina, two on California, two on Maryland, etc. By dumb luck alone, none of them detonated. It was only after a crash of four thermonuclear bombs on Greenland that the program was killed, two years after Spain.
Despite our gross mishandling of the risks, we have somehow come out alive. A world with nuclear weapons is not a world we can sustain.
A harrowing story indeed.
It is nothing short of a miracle that we have not yet fallen to a nuclear catastrophe. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of course very close, with military advisors on both sides pushing for strikes. A more disturbing (IMO) tempting of fate was the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident [1], where soviet defense systems detected incoming ICBMs from the US. Protocol dictates launching retaliatory nuclear strikes, but the Soviet colonel at the early warning system, Stanislav Petrov, deemed it to be a false alarm, which it ultimately was. Had he followed orders, we would have experienced a full scale nuclear war.
Perhaps more upsetting is the number of nuclear catastrophes the US nearly inflicted on itself. The incident in the TFA is just one of several such incidents arising from a single Cold War Air Force program: Operation Chrome Dome [2]. The US would fly multiple bombers carrying up to four thermonuclear bombs in a loop from Texas eastward over the Atlantic up to Greenland then west and south over Canada back to the PNW US. Everyday we had bombers above us, and some of those days they accidentally dropped nukes on us. Two on North Carolina, two on California, two on Maryland, etc. By dumb luck alone, none of them detonated. It was only after a crash of four thermonuclear bombs on Greenland that the program was killed, two years after Spain.
Despite our gross mishandling of the risks, we have somehow come out alive. A world with nuclear weapons is not a world we can sustain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome
[3] https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/broken-arrows/index.ht...
[4] https://archive.org/details/DODNarrativeSummariesofAccidents...