TechStuffTechStuff Classic: Close, but No Nuclear War
The world has teetered on the brink of nuclear war a few times. Sometimes, it was because of technical glitches. Sometimes, it was because of coincidences. We explore some very close calls.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? It is time for a classic.
Episode, and this one is a bit of a sobering one. It is called Close but.
No Nuclear War.
It originally published on May seventeenth, twenty seventeen, and it's all about some close calls the world got into a few times over the last few decades.
Enjoy. Let's go to basic science on this one. So I'm going to start fundamental. I know you guys know this, but I feel like it's always important to start from the base and build your way up. So you probably are familiar with this from elementary school science and atom consists of a nucleus orbited by one or more electrons, and the nucleus contains one or more protons and possibly some neutrons. Electrons have a negative charge, protons have a positive charge, and neutrons have no charge at all because their credit is bad. Now, if you know the rules about electromagnetic charges, you remember that opposites attract and the same charges repel each other. So that raises a question, how can an atom have a nucleus with two or more protons in it and not just break apart? If you have two positively charged particles sub atomic particles protons that close to each other, how come they don't just push against each other and the nucleus just pop splits apart. And then we would just end up with hydrogen atoms, because a hydrogen atom is just a proton and an electron, your basic hydrogen atom. That would all make sense, right if the entire universe was just hydrogen. Why do we have nucleuses or nuclei I should say nuclei with multiple protons. Well, to answer this question, we have to turn to the Standard Model of physics, which is mostly how we think the universe works. Mostly, the Standard model doesn't quite incorporate everything. It doesn't explain absolutely everything. Gravity is a big mystery with the Standard model. We consider it one of the four fundamental forces, but we don't really have all the mechanisms explained under the Standard Model of physics. It does, however, give us a pretty good idea of what's going on. It's held up to lots of experimentation and observations, so The standard model says that stuff like protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, which is not as I learned the sound made by a Dirk. Quarks are the smallest building block we know of right now, and you can't split them up into smaller things. That's as small as you can get, at least as far as we know at the moment. Anyway, there's a force that holds these quark particles together to form larger particles called hadrons, among which are protons and neutrons. Those are both types of hadrons. There are lots and lots of other ones as well, and this force is called the strong nuclear force. It's also what binds nuclei together so that they don't go splitting up all over the place, and out of the four fundamental forces of our universe, this is the strongest. However, it also takes effect over the smallest distance. The range is incredibly small. It's on the sub atomic scale, so while it's very strong, it doesn't reach very far. There's also a weak nuclear force. The physicist Enrico Fermi theorized that the weak nuclear force was what he was observing when he saw certain atoms undergoing what is called beta decay. Has nothing to do with Siamese fish. Beta decay is about a neutron or a proton atoms nucleus switching sides. Essentially, a neutron will change it into a proton, and it will expel an electron in the process, so you've got a neutrally charged particle, it expels an electron. It becomes positive as a result, And to make matters a bit more confusing, we call this electron that gets expelled a beta particle, so it is an electron, but specifically a beta particle. Another subatomic particle also forms in this process. It's called an antineutrino. So this type of beta decay is called beta minus decay. However, there's also a beta plus decay. That's when you have the opposite happen, where a proton becomes a neutron as opposed to a neutron becoming a proton. Beta plus decay products include not just the brand new neutron. It also includes a subatomic particle called a positron and a neutrino. So you get antineutrinos and electrons with one, and you get positrons and neutrinos, with the other anyway weak. The nuclear force explains this process of nuclear decay, this particular type of nuclear decay. They're a couple of others as well. So when atoms decay, one of the byproducts is also energy. They give off energy as they decay, they radiate it. So this is the source of radiation. That's why we call it nuclear radiation. Not all atoms do this because some of them are perfectly stable. That means that they're not going to decay into some other form because they're already stable. They're not there's nothing for them to get more stable. It's kind of like if you were to have, you know, a stack of things and they fall over to a certain point, they're not going to fall anymore because they're flat against the ground. That's as far as they go. That's kind of the same idea. Now, in the case of nuclear weapons, the elements we use, their atoms need just the right push in order to have their nuclei split, and when that happens, the split nuclei shoot off a few neutrons, and that ultimately is the secret sauce to nuclear weapons. So here's how it all works. Well, let's say you get yourself a whole bunch of a particular large, unstable atom. Let's say, for argument's sake, it's oh, I don't know, uranium two thirty five, which is essentially weaponized uranium. It also actually it's out there in nature. It is not the most common form of uranium in nature because it is by its very nature unstable. It will decay on its own over a very long period of time. The more common form of uranium in nature is uranium two thirty eight, but for weapons you want uranium two thirty five. It's an isope of uranium. Isotopes are forms of an element that have the same number of protons, because if you change the number of protons, you change the element itself, so it has to have the exact same number of protons from isotope to isotope, but has a different number of neutrons. So, as another example, carbon twelve is a type of carbon that has six protons and six neutrons. Carbon fourteen is different. It's got six protons and eight neutrons. It's also radioactive, meaning it will decay into a more stable form or another a more stable atom, and give off energy in that process as well. As some neutrons. So uranium two thirty five has ninety two protons and one hundred forty three neutrons. The half life of uranium two thirty five is seven hundred million years now half life. What that means is that if you had a chunk of uranium two thirty five, so you've got a whole bunch of these uranium two thirty five atoms, it's statistically probable that after seven hundred million years past, half of those atoms would decay have decayed to other more stable atoms. Statistically speaking, this is all about probability, not about a definite future. That's the thing you have to remember about half life. It's about probability, not definitive outcomes. Uranium two thirty eight, that more common form of uranium I talked about, has a half life of four point five billion years. So while uranium two thirty five is seven hundred million years half life, that's a long long time, I mean, particularly for human species. Right, four point five billion years leaves it in the dust. All right, So back to uranium two thirty five. Fermine was able to create a controlled nuclear reaction using uranium two thirty five. So what he did was he took a He took low speed neutrons and fired them at atoms of uranium two thirty five in order to break the isotope part splitting it. That's what we call nuclear fission. We're splitting an atom. In this process, the atom gives off heat and radiation as well as generating new atoms. Right, because you split it into two or more components. Also in that process, it shoots off some extra neutrons, so those go spinning off. Now that means that if you had enough uranium two thirty five, and you had a means of making sure those neutrons that gave off could hit those other atoms of uranium two thirty five, you could continue this reaction. It becomes a chain reaction. The neutrons that get fired off hit other uranium two thirty five atoms, which then produce more free neutrons flying outward, which can hit more uranium two thirty five atoms, and so on and so forth. And each time you're doing this, it's generating more and more heat and energy and radiation. And thus, if you were to do this in an uncontrolled way, you get a bomb. If you do it in a controlled way, you can have a nuclear power plant. Our power plants are based off nuclear fission because that's the type of nuclear power we have found to be sustainable. Right now, there's a real push to make nuclear fusion a sustainable means of generating electricity, but right now it is very difficult to create a sustainable version of that. We can we can start nuclear fusion, but generally speaking, we tend to put as much or more energy into the system as we're getting out of it, and so that doesn't really work if you want a sustainable form of generating electricity. If you're spending more than you take in, you go broke eventually. Anyway, this uncontrolled chain reaction could be more of a bomb situation, although to be fair, in nuclear weapons it's still very much a controlled system. It's just controlled in a way to release annormous amount of energy in a very destructive way.
We'll be back with more about close calls with nuclear war, a fun filled topic after these quick messages.
Now, this requires enriched uranium. It requires a lot of uranium two thirty five. You need a really high concentration of uranium two thirty five because uranium two thirty eight doesn't accept neutrons as readily. So if you shoot neutrons at uranium two thirty five, you're it's much easier to split that than if you were to fire it off at uranium two thirty eight. So weapons grade uranium is typically about ninety percent uranium two thirty five. This is a much higher concentration than you would find out in nature. So with these nuclear bombs, you have to make sure that the fuel is kept in separate subcritical masses to prevent premature detonation. So you obviously don't want this thing to go off before you intend it to, or else you're going to destroy yourself. To make it explode, you need the bomb to achieve what is called critical mass. This is the minimum amount of mass you need of fissionable material to create a nuclear chain reaction sufficient enough to act as a weapon. So over at HowStuffWorks dot Com, we have an article all about this about how nuclear weapons work, and it contains a really helpful analogy. It says, imagine that the fissionable material, the stuff that you are going to split, is represented as a bunch of marbles inside a circle. If the marbles are really close together, then you shoot a marble into that circle, it's going to hit against a couple of other marbles. If you've used enough force, it's going to create a little chain reaction. That's what we're talking about with fissionable material and a nuclear bomb. But if you fire a marble off into a circle and all the individual marbles are further apart from each other, it's less likely that you're going to be able to set off that nuclear chain reaction because even if you hit another marble, it's far enough away from its fellow marbles that you're not likely to make it a consistent, persistent nuclear chain reaction. And so that's really the difference between critical and subcritical masses. Now. To start the whole reaction, nuclear weapons typically use a pellet of polonium and beryllium separated by a piece of foil. When the subcritical masses come together, as in when a bomb is set to detonate, and more about that in a second, it causes the polonium to emit alpha particles, and an alpha particle, in case you're curious, is a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons that are bound together. The alpha particles make contact with a beryllium, which cause it to transform into an isotope of beryllium and emit neutrons. So the beryllium changes into a different type of beryllium, a different isotope of beryllium, and it ejects these neutrons as part of it. Those ejected neutrons then become the starting point for the nuclear chain reaction. Now surrounding your enriched uranium two thirty five is a casing called a tamper. That's what's designed to contain the energy of the nuclear fission until it's time to release it in the form of the nuclear explosion. And typically it's uranium two thirty eight that ends up redirecting those free neutrons back into the core so that they can more efficiently impact other uranium two thirty five atoms, and it aids in the continuation of fission. The more fissionable material gets activated, the more efficient the bomb is, and the bigger the explosion you get as a result. Now, one way to detonate a nuclear weapon is with the uranium bullet method. So typically you have the tamper, which you know as this container of some sort kind of like it's usually kind of a cylinder shape because you're fitting it inside a larger form factor of a bomb, and that's what's made of uranium two thirty eight. Inside of this you have a sphere of uranium two thirty five, and in the center of the sphere is your neutron generator, in other words, your little pellet of polonium and brillium. You've got a tube leading down into the center of the sphere. At the other end of the tube are some explosives, and inside the tube is a bullet of uranium two thirty five. So when it's time to detonate the bomb, you explode the explosives. These are conventional explosives, not nuclear explosives. That propels the uranium two thirty five bullet and a very high rate down the tube, colliding with the pellet and thus initiating the neutron generator, which shoots out neutrons and thus starts to fission the uranium two thirty five. This fissioning activity happens in an instant, like the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, but in that fraction each time this is happening so so fast that energy builds and builds and builds and builds, until it's greater than what the bomb itself can contain. And then it explodes. It takes place so fast that it's like billions of a second. You want to be super careful with that, obviously, because it's a massive amount of destruction. Now, there's another method for detonating a nuclear weapon called the implosion method, in which high explosives around the tamper. So again that uranium two thirty eight, typically explosive surrounding it create a powerful shock wave when they go off. So the explosive go off creates a shockwave generated into the center of this that compresses the tamper and thus compresses the fissionable core inside the tamper, and that triggers the fissioning reaction, and you get the same result as the one I mentioned earlier. Now, in World War Two, we dropped two atomic bombs. We the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. One of them called Little Boy, and that was a uranium bullet style bomb. The other was called Fat Man, and that was an implosion style bomb, and it also used plutonium two thirty nine as its core, not uranium, but plutonium two thirty nine. Later, a guy named Edward Teller, who we've talked about on tech stuff before, improved the yield of nuclear weapons using what is called the boosting method. This combines fusion reactions with fission bombs. The fusion reactions would create the neutrons which then would trigger the fission reactions at a really high rate, so more efficiently, so you get more of the fissionable material to split, thus generating more energy, and nearly ninety percent of American nuclear weapons follow that particular design. But then you've also got fusion bombs. Now, fusion is when you fuse two atoms together and you still get a big release of energy in this process. Essentially, these bombs fuse hydrogen isotopes including deuterium and tritium together and that ends up releasing an enormous amount of energy. So to explode a bomb of this type, you reverse the roles of fusion and fission. You know, I just mentioned that to make a really efficient fission bomb, you could incorporate fusion into it as well well. In this case, you're talking about using fission reactions in order to fuel a fusion reaction, which will generate the massive amount of energy for the bomb. So the fission bomb would create an implosion shockwave, kind of like the explosives I talked about in the previous example with fat Man, and in that shockwave you would also get a release of X rays. That's one of the types of energy you would get as a release from a fission reaction. The X rays will end up heating the tamper, which you still have, just like you would with the other types of nuclear weapons, and that would still be uranium two thirty eight typically inside of which is a fuel of lithium deuteride, and that would end up heating up because of the X rays. The X rays heat up the lithium deuteride. The shockwave would compress the lithium deuteride by a factor of like thirty It's crazy how compressed it gets. And also inside the tamper is a plutonium rod which would start to fission as a result of all this, and that would release more heat more neutrons. Those neutrons would combine with the compressed lithium deuteride to fuel to create tritium, so you would then have enough temperature and pressure to support fusion reactions. That's one of the problems with nuclear fusion power plants is that you have to create such an intense amount of pressure and temperature that the energy you pour in is equal to or greater than the energy you're getting out of the actual fusion. Well, in a bomb, that's not so much a concern. You want to generate as much of this heat and pressure as you possibly can, so because the fission reactions are creating that tremendous amount of heat and pressure, nuclear fusion can actually occur, and you start getting tritium deuterium and deuterium deuterium reactions, and that generates even more heat and more radiation, which is enough to induce fission in the uranium two thirty eight tamper. So remember the uranium two thirty eight tamper doesn't typically fission in most of these bombs, it requires so much energy to do that. But these fusion bombs can actually eat that kind of energy. The combination of all that energy is enormous, and then the bomb explodes, releasing it into the environment. Now, at the point of explosion, you would easily imagine there's an intense release of an incredible amount of heat, and the blast also creates a really powerful pressure wave moving outward from the point of explosion. Then on top of that, you've got the radiation, the energy being radiated out like gamma rays and other very harmful forms of radiation, followed by radiation fallout, which is typically radioactive dust and debris that originated inside the bomb itself. Stuff close to the hypocenter, which is another term for ground zero, would be vaporized because of the temperatures involved. We're talking three hundred million degrees celsius or five hundred million degrees fahrenheit. Further out from the center, the pressure wave could cause entire buildings to collapse because it's so powerful, and the heat is still intense enough to cause fatalities. It's hot enough to burn people alive even if you're not right there at the point of explosion. The further out you go, the less effect those initial events will have. The heat will become less intense the further out, The pressure wave less effective further out, but there are a lot of secondary problems that could still be life threatening, including things like fallout, radiation fallouts going to spread really far and will continue to spread based upon prevailing winds of the area, and also stuff like fires. The heat is going to be hot enough to generate a lot of fires in a lot of areas, and that could end up being a very prevalent and immediate danger to you. So that's cheerful. Right. Nuclear weapons are terrifying, There's no question about it. They can wak devastation greater than anything humans have ever witnessed. And since World War Two, many have worked really hard to make sure no more nuclear weapons see use ever again. But we've had a whole lot of close calls, and I'm gonna go more into that in just a minute, but first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, We're gonna start with probably the closest we've ever been to getting into a full on nuclear confrontation. There were other events that happened before this, and there are other events that happened after this, and I'll cover some of those later on, but let's start with the granddaddy, the big one. That would be October nineteen sixty two, when the United States of America and the then Soviet Union were at the height of the Cold War. So you had these two powerful countries standing in opposition to each other, and both were building up their respective militaries and arsenals in an effort to stay on top or at least not fall behind their great rival. It's a pretty terrifying time for everybody, whether you lived in the Soviet Union or the United States or one of countless other nations that felt helpless because these two giants were posturing against each other. And one could argue, we're sort of returning to that kind of world now, but that's really a discussion for a different show anyway. In October nineteen sixty two, an event called the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. This was a nuclear game of chess between the White House and the Kremlin, and it was the closest the United States and the USSR ever got to a full fledged nuclear conflict on both sides. This at least, this was the closest anyone got that wasn't the creation of a computational error. More on those types of close calls in a little bit. So to catch you guys up on some history in case you don't know about the Cuban Missile crisis, the government in Cuba was Communist and that was something that made the United States government really nervous. So the US attempted to overthrow the Cuban government. But that was a total disaster. That was the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as some other events that were around that time. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had reached an agreement with Cuba. The Soviet Union would install nuclear missiles and nuclear aircraft nuclear capable aircraft in Cuba as a deterrent to US invasions, and it would also serve as a handy launchpad for a strike against the US should things devolve into a nuclear war. Now, the United States got wind of that plan, and President Kennedy issued a warning to the Soviet Union and essentially said, hey, stop putting stuff in Cuba. Man, it's not cool, especially nuclear stuff, all right. On October fourteenth, nineteen sixty two, American spy aircraft captured images of what was clearly medium and intermediate range ballistic nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba, and they were close to being finished. They were on the fast track, and thus the Cuban Missile crisis was born. Kennedy ordered what he called a naval quarantine on Cuba on October twenty second. Now this was essentially a blockade, except they didn't call it a blockade. They gave it the name quarantine because blockade suggests an act of war, and they didn't want that to be the case. And it's amazing to me how word choice can somehow make two things that are essentially the same legally distinct. But I digress. The Soviet Union wasn't just trying to poke the United States in this case. It wasn't just an instance of them saying we're trying to get the edge on you. The Soviets were concerned because the United States had Jupiter missile systems stationed in Turkey, so they were within striking range of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union wanted those missiles out of Turkey. Installing missiles in Cuba would kind of level things out, but simultaneous, simultaneously rather escalate tensions, you know that super fun, awesome combo. So while you had the president of the United States and the premiere of the Soviet Union arguing with each other and trying to convince each other to back off, things were getting really really tense around and inside Cuba. And what most folks didn't know for a really long time was that the area around Cuba was host to four secret submarines. Soviet submarines armed with nuclear tipped torpedoes, and these submarines were told to use those nuclear weapons in the event that the Americans attacked Cuba and attempt another invasion, which was an option that the White House was seriously considering at the time, and several of the President's advisors were actually advocating for an air strike against Cuba. So imagine if that air strike had happened, and these submarine commanders were following orders that would have initiated a nuclear strike against the United States, and then October twenty seventh, nineteen sixty two happened. So conditions were not great. Cuba, in case you're not aware, is much warmer than the USSR, and the submarines were ill equipped to deal with that heat. They ran on diesel engines, and they had battery power as well, and accasionally they would have to resurface to recharge their batteries. The air conditioning systems were not very good on these submarines, and they would fail pretty frequently, so it would get stiflingly hot and stuffy inside of them. And then you had this constant tension of aggression surrounding these crews, plus the directive that you were to launch a nuclear attack against one of the most powerful nations on the planet in the event of any sort of military aggression against Cuba, and it was pretty much a cocktail for disaster. On top of that, you would know that any attack you made against the United States would be returned against the Soviet Union, there would be a retaliatory strike, and that this would initiate a full global conflict. So it was serious business. Now. Making matters worse than that, as if you can imagine such a thing, was the fact that the Soviet subs didn't have any con tact with their headquarters. They could not get in contact with Moscow. The best they could manage was picking up radio signals from a civilian broadcast station in Florida, So they're getting all their news from a US source in Florida, not from headquarters. American forces eventually spotted the submarines, so they did what was under the rules for Americans at the time, which was if they spotted submarines in the area, they set off signaling charges. Now, signaling charge is an explosive, so they were setting off explosives in the ocean near the submarines. Now, the purpose of the explosions was not to cause any damage to the submarines. They were supposed to be harmless, and in fact they were in this case harmless. They did not cause damage to the submarines. What they're supposed to do is essentially be the equivalent of knocking on someone's door saying, hey, I know your home. Come to the door, except in this case it's hey, I know you're in there surface, because otherwise we're going to consider it a threat. So obviously increasing tensions even further. So you would imagine that setting explosions off near nuclear armed submarines is potentially a disastrous idea, and it could have been. But no one fired any nuclear weapons at that stage, and that's amazing. It was super close. Tensions could not have been higher without any actual fighting U but no one pulled the trigger on that. Now, the US had moved to def Con three earlier in October. So deaf con stands for defense condition, and there are five levels of deaf con and they get worse the lower the number is, so Defcon five is the best. Defcon one is the most dangerous. So the lower the number, the closer the un US is to maximum combat readiness. So In other words, Defcon one means the US is ready to commit some massive military power in an act of war. Level three means increase enforce readiness above normal readiness. So that was the level they were at earlier in October, was an increased level of readiness. As I recorded this, we stand at Defcon four. Defcon four means normal increased intelligence and strengthened security measures, so normal readiness, but we're paying way more attention than we would be at Defcon five. Defcon five just means normal peacetime readiness. Sure would be nice to be there, but for the United States, the actions of North Korea and Russia recently have made this complicated. So we've been at Defcon four, oh in China two to some extent. Anyway, by October twenty seventh, the United States had decided to bump this up to Defcon level two, which is further increase in force readiness but less than maximum readiness, which I don't know how you determined that. If you just ask people, Hey, are you guys ready, And if they say yes, and you say are you as ready as you can be and they say no, then I guess maybe that's it. Anyway, I would say, if we were to translate this, this would come into you know, yo hold me back, bro level. That would be essentially what Defcon level two is is YO hold me back. So you're ready to swing your fist, but you're not actively swinging your fist. And it shows that the tensions were really at a high point. So it was not a sure thing that cooler heads would actually prevail on that day in October on those Soviet submarines. I'm thankful they did, though, but it was never a sure thing. Now, in the end, Soviets remove their missiles and bombers from Cuba and later the United States of their Jupiter missile installations from Turkey, and apparently that had been the plan the whole time. The United States was already planning on removing those missile installations in Turkey, which was one of the demands the Soviet Union had had, saying, hey, if we're going to pull out a Cuba, you got to pull out Turkey. But the US didn't agree upon it as a point of negotiation, even though they had already planned on doing that. So that was interesting that the US had planned on removing those missiles, but they did not agree to having that be part of the terms to settle this crisis, maybe because it might have made the country look weak or something. I don't know. I don't pretend to understand global politics. The point is that both the United States and the USSR backed off from the button and opened up a channel of communication that still exists to this day, this hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, though there are times when one site isn't that eager to take the other side's calls. Oh, and by backed off, I don't mean that things calmed down right away. The US Strategic Air Command or SAC remained at deaf Con two from October twenty third, nineteen sixty two to November fifteenth, nineteen sixty five, so more than three years. Only then did it quote unquote posture down to deaf Con three because it was scary. Now. I recorded a few other shows that also tie into this same era in various ways. For example, the space race was largely an extension of the Cold War. In fact, you could argue that without the Cold War we never would have been to the moon. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were racing to send people into space and to the moon, and it was in part an effort to prove that they that their country was technologically superior to the rival country. But there was also an element of intimidation involved. So essentially, if you could send a rocket into orbit, you could also send a rocket all the way around the Earth and hit a target on the other side, like say the United States from the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Union from the United States. So in part, the space race was a way of saying, hey, we have the capability of wiping you off the planet, so don't push us. The thing was both sides were making that argument at the same time. Again, absolutely terrifying, although we got some awesome stuff out of it. I mean, the space race gave us tons of technology and pushed our scientific understanding of our solar system quite a bit, so it's not like it was all bad, but the motivations behind it were largely motivated by politics and military goals. Luckily we were able to leverage that into ways that were not indirectly connected to conflict. But yeah, once the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit. Sputnik was the satellite, the first man made satellite in orbit around the Earth. All it did was really beep, but amateur radio operators in the United States picked up the beeping, and it caused quite a bit of panic because suddenly everyone realized that if the Soviet Union could launch something into orbit, they could probably launch something all the way to the United States. The innerconnal in the intercontinental Ballistic missile or ICBM was essentially born at that point. Anyway, let's go back to close calls with nuclear war, because that's really what we're here to talk about. And let's jump ahead to November ninth, nineteen seventy nine. That's when the North American Aerospace Defense Headquarters, or NORAD for short, went bonkers. I would say that they went ballistic, but luckily they didn't, because that would have been a terrible, terrifying punt. In that case, according to the computer systems over at NOORAD, a huge missile attack from the Soviet Union was on its way to targets within the United States. And this is what we often in the technology world would call a bad thing. So nor AD was following protocol and they sent an alert to high level command posts and the tippy top of US military leadership, and immediately the command was given to put ICBM crews on the highest possible alert, and nuclear bomber crews were scrambled to their aircraft to prepare for takeoff. The airborne command Post, which is the aircraft that the President of the United States is supposed to be a board in the event of a massive attack. This is what creates a mobile base of operations. It took off, so the airborne Command Post took off into the atmosphere. The President wasn't on it at the time, which seems like a bit of an oversight, but it did take off. So for more than five incredibly tense minutes, United States operators were scouring satellite data to confirm that the Soviets had indeed launched missiles against the United States. They had the information from the NORAD computers, but they wanted, obviously to confirm that information with satellite data, but they couldn't find any data to confirm it. United States leaders decided magnanimously not to launch a full scale retaliation, which is a good thing because it would have turned out that they would have been committing a first strike. There was nothing to retaliate against. So what the heck actually happened? And the answer is pretty crazy, and it sounds like something from a movie like Airplane. It sounds like a deleted scene from a disaster spoof movie. What had happened was a technician had inserted a training tape into an operational nor AD computer. The training tape contained various scenarios on it, including one in which the Soviet Union launches a full scale missile attack against the United States. And this was just to run simulations, to run what would happen in this case and how effective would a retaliatory strike be. That's all it was. But it was being run on an operational nor AD computer, which interpreted this to mean the Soviet Union had actually launched an attack, not that it was a simulation. So a training tape very nearly started World War Three. In nineteen seventy nine, the United States wisely decided that it would be a really good idea to make sure nor AD computers would not be able to run training tapes in the future, and so they NERFD it. Essentially, they removed that ability for nor AD computers to run these simulations. Now, I've got a lot more to talk about as far as FOSSE alarms and close calls go. But before I jump into that, last section. Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So these sort of things happen really rarely, right, please.
Not.
According to Marshall Shulman, who was a State Department advisor, he said that false alerts would happen fairly regularly, which is absolutely terrifying, and in fact said they happen regularly enough that handling them almost became a matter of routine, which is troubling all by itself. And that's what Shulman said. He said, it's almost terrifying to see the level of complacency in dealing with these because they happened that frequently. I mean, you want your team to respond calmly in the wake of an alert because you want to make sure that they are going through the steps to verify that it is in fact at what it seems to be. You don't want them acting on misinformation. At the same time, you don't want them to fall victim to boy who cried Wolfe scenarios where they don't take it seriously enough. So you want to balance there, and according to Shulman, the complacency issue was getting to be a bit troubling for him. Now, just so you don't go thinking that the United States was alone and having faulty systems. Let me tell you about September twenty sixth, nineteen eighty three. That is when a Soviet satellite, part of an early detection system for missile launches, sent down a message indicating the United States had fired a nuclear missile, and then another nuclear missile, and then three more nuclear missiles, so it might have looked like an initial attack with five missiles heading toward the Soviet Union. Now, tensions were already high across the Soviet Union and the United States for other reasons. Earlier that month, the Soviet Union had shot down a South Korean passenger plane thinking that it was a military plane invading their airspace, and that's not what it was. So it was a tragic accident. But there was also a lot of worry that the United States could potentially retaliate for this, and so the first reaction could have been that this was the US's response to that act. Now, the man in charge over at a early detection center in the Soviet Union was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, and he held the authority to launch a retaliatory strike, but he didn't exercise this authority he deduced that a genuine attack on the Soviet Union from the United States would involve hundreds of missiles, not just five. He said, if you're going to start a war, you wouldn't launch only five missiles. It wouldn't be an enough of a quantity to knock out enough of the Soviet Union's capability to retaliate, so it would just be inviting worldwide destruction. So Petrov said, I'm pretty sure this isn't real. I'm gonna stake my life and my reputation on it, and he was right. So then they began to investigate what was the cause of this false alarm, because that is what it turned out to be. So the cause was the satellite itself. It had misidentified a reflection from the top of some clouds. The sun was hitting these clouds at just the right angle for the reflection to hit the satellite, and the position the orientation of the satellite with respect to the United States made it look like this was coming from known US missile launch sites, So the satellite misidentified the reflections as missile launches, and really the satellite was in a good orbit to avoid this kind of misunderstanding. The problem was it was just the perfect set of circumstances. It was the equinox, the sun was setting, and the satellite was in a position at just the right time with clouds in the right position to cause this confusion. And normally it wouldn't have happened, and any other time of the year, the angles wouldn't have been right. It was just a coincidence. Fortunately, because there was a human being in charge who had the capacity to question the results presented by the satellite, we didn't see a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union launched at the United States as a result. Sometimes a science experiment runs the risk of plunging us into nuclear conflict, so that's exciting. So for example, there was the Black Brant twelve rocket, which was a cooperative effort between the United States and Norway. It launched out of Norway along the coastline of Norway, and it had a mission to send up a probe essentially to study the northern lights, the Aurora borealis. Norway had picked up the phone to call up their Russian neighbors and say, hey, by the way, we're going to launch this satellite, so don't freak out, but we're going to do it on such and such a day, at such and such a time, and so Russia knew about this. The only problem was that information never got to the people in charge of the early warning detection systems, so they had no knowledge of a planned scientific rocket launch. Instead, they had radar detectors looking at their screens and saying, it appears that a missile has launched, potentially from a United States submarine and on a trajectory that could take it to the Soviet Union. So there was immediately a reaction that this could potentially be an early attack, and in fact there was worry that perhaps this was a warhead meant to explode to knockout radar detection so that we can then have an entire full blown attack follow it and the radar systems would be down. In the meantime, the word went up to the Krivlin and Boris Yeltsin went so far as to activate his nuclear football. The nuclear football is a device that leaders used to authorize a nuclear strike. Other radar centers and Russian satellites couldn't find any evidence of any other missile preparations, so there was no other corroborating evidence to suggest that this was in fact a legitimate missile strike aimed at the United States. So this led the Russians to conclude it wasn't actually an attack, and eventually the word got out that this was a scientific mission that had previous authorization and that Russia had been in communication with Norway the whole time. It just never got to the military side. Whoopsie Daisy almost went to full nuclear war over that. And you probably heard the story about how a flock of birds nearly initiated World War III. That was actually an oversimplification of what had happened. It was a story that actually predates the Cuban missile crisis. This goes back to the Suez Canal crisis in Egypt. The Suez Canal had proven to be critical during both World War One and World War Two, and so lots of different entities wanted to have control over the canal for strategic purposes. This included the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. So you had a lot of tensions in the area, and the whole conflict is way too complex to get into. I'm pretty sure the stuff you missed in history class hosts have talked to about the Suez Canal crisis in the past, and like I said, it gets super complicated, but I can talk about a series of coincidental events that nearly led us to World War Three. It happened on November fifth, nineteen fifty six. NORAD detected these coincidental events, which collectively looked like it could have been a big aggressive move by the Soviet Union, like an actual massing to attack other areas of Europe and possibly launched attacks against the United States. Those coincidences included a fleet of ships Soviet ships moving from the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea. There were a large number of MiG jets reported flying over Syria. There was a report of a British bomber being shot down also in Syria, and then there was an unknown number of unidentified aircraft detected over Turkey. But each of those events turned out to not be that big of a deal once the details were learned, so it's fortunate that no one thought those collective events actually amounted to a full attack. The fleet maneuver turned out to just be a routine exercise among the Soviet fleet. It had nothing to do with any sort of aggressive act. The group of MiGs was much smaller than had been reported. It wasn't like one hundred jets. It was actually a typical escort detail. The British bomber hadn't been shot down, the aircraft had suffered a mechanical failure and they had to make an emergency landing in Syria. And the mysterious aircraft flying over Turkey turned out to be a flock of swans, which after a lengthy questioning, turned out not to be Soviet agents. And let me give you one last example of a close call. There are more besides this one, by the way, lots more, but here's one last one. On June third, ninth, defense displays at the Pentagon, the White House and a NORAD flipped out. Now they had a display of four digits, which usually read as zero zero zero zero, just four zero straight across. These were numbers to indicate any nuclear missiles that had been detected as being launched. So you want to see all zeros. There's any number besides a zero on that display, that's a big problem. The counters began to show the number two instead of zero, indicating a massive missile attack, and so to be certain, bomber crews were given orders to prepare their aircraft and missile launch systems began to warm up for a retaliatory strike, while the top brass tried to figure out if this was in fact for real z's or not. Luckily, said brass determined that it was not for realsy's and they ordered everyone to stand down. As a result, three days later, the same thing had happen again, and again everyone got prepared for a massive retaliatory strike, and two false alarms that could cause a nuclear apocalypse warranted a full look at the system. Technicians trace the problem to a single computer chip, just one computer chip in the entire system that wasn't wired correctly. So replacing that chip solved the problem and they stopped having this issue with the display giving a false indicator of missile launches. That one faulty chip could have resulted in a nuclear war or at least a nuclear strike, which is absolutely terrifying. So what is the moral of the story here, Well, one thing is that nuclear weapons are super duper scary. I'd love to see them become a thing of the past, but they're incredibly powerful and all it takes is one critical error to cause untold amounts of damage or precipitate a globally catastrophic series of events. But another lesson to take here is that we at least have been fortunate so far to have people calm enough to reevaluate a situation before committing the ultimate act of warfare. It sure would be nice if it weren't necessary to say, thank goodness, we have the right folks in the right place at the wrong time, but thank goodness we do have them.
That's it for the classic episode close but no Nuclear War. I guess the takeaway from all this is, despite the close calls, we never had a nuclear war. So that's something that we should hold on to. I hope you are all well. I'll talk to you again really soon.
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