Tonight in 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated toward confrontation, a sentry on patrol at Duluth Air Force Base, Minnesota, thought he saw someone climbing the perimeter fence. He shot at the intruder and activated the base sabotage alarm, which by design automatically triggered ... - ThreadSky

atomicanalyst.bsky.social • 491 days ago

Tonight in 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated toward confrontation, a sentry on patrol at Duluth Air Force Base, Minnesota, thought he saw someone climbing the perimeter fence. He shot at the intruder and activated the base sabotage alarm, which by design automatically triggered ...

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atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

the same alarm at nearby military bases (in the 1960s, war planners working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff anticipated that coordinated sabotage operations might precede a Soviet nuclear first strike). But at Volk Field Air National Guard Base near Tomah, Wisconsin, crossed wires activated ...

bill-n1vux.bsky.social•491 days ago

So physical wires literally cross-connected in this case?

(I heard of urinal flush line inadvertently connected to lo-pressure steam heat line once. Before widespread use of magic eye auto flush, thankfully. )

atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

the “scramble” Klaxon instead, sending pilots sprinting to their F-106A interceptors to take off, aircraft that—because DEFCON 3 had been declared three days earlier—now carried an AIR-2A Genie air-to-air nuclear rocket (armed with a ~1.7-kiloton warhead). Under DEFCON 3, practice alerts ...

atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

had been suspended and aircraft had been dispersed to smaller bases to increase their survivability, so the pilots had no reason not to believe that a nuclear war was now underway and that they would soon be firing their nuclear-armed missiles at incoming Soviet nuclear bombers.

atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

Nevertheless, a commander at Volk called Duluth to confirm that his planes should launch. Upon being told the Klaxon sounding was in error, he raced onto the active runway in a truck, flashing his lights in order to get the taxiing aircraft to abort their takeoffs.

atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

Other than the personnel involved and their superiors, this incident remained largely unknown until Scott Sagan got the Air Force to declassify the relevant documents and wrote about them in his outstanding 1993 book, “The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons.”

atomicanalyst.bsky.social•491 days ago

And the mysterious intruder who started it all? It turned out to be a black bear, which scrambled back into the woods, apparently unharmed.

ottomanesq.bsky.social•491 days ago

@threadreaderapp unroll

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