Heroic USAF Captain Defied Orders and Stopped America From Starting World War III in 1962...

[Octafish]

...during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Captain William Bassett stopped to think before pressing The Button. Thank goodness, otherwise most of the planet would be celebrating Dia de Los Muertos from the Other Side.

The Okinawa missiles of October

Aaron Tovish
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oct. 25, 2015

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.

The story begins just after midnight, in the wee hours of October 28, 1962, at the very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then-Air Force airman John Bordne says he began his shift full of apprehension. At the time, in response to the developing crisis over secret Soviet missile deployments in Cuba, all US strategic forces had been raised to Defense Readiness Condition 2, or DEFCON2; that is, they were prepared to move to DEFCON1 status within a matter of minutes. Once at DEFCON1, a missile could be launched within a minute of a crew being instructed to do so.

Bordne, now 74, appeared in an introductory video, and then answered questions via Skype from his home in Pennsylvania. Recounting the atmosphere on the base that week, Bordne described all his fellow airmen crowding around a television to watch President John F. Kennedy discuss the standoff with the Soviet Union: “There was standing room only. There was dead silence during … and there was dead silence after. It was then that we really got the impression we would have to do what we were paid to do.”

SNIP...

According to Bordne, as Bassett attempted to determine whether the orders were legitimate, a lieutenant decided that Bassett did not have the authority to stop the launch, and ordered his section of the overall crew to proceed to fire its four missiles. Bassett, says Bordne, threatened to have the lieutenant shot.

SNIP...

As of today there’s no way to know for certain whether events transpired 53 years ago as Bordne describes them. Bassett died in 2011, and Bordne remains the only participant willing to describe them on the record. However, a Japanese news outlet spoke last year to another U.S. veteran who was willing to anonymously confirm Bordne’s account. There was general agreement among the other participants in the U.N. discussion, including Princeton nuclear security expert Bruce Blair, that Bordne’s account was credible.

CONTINUED...

http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826

Former Airman John Bordne appeared via Skype to discuss the incident with the United Nations yesterday.

[bemildred]

1. Crazy as minks in heat. nt

[Octafish]

3. Unspeakably Crazy

Time and again, during the Cuban Missile and throughout his brief presidency, President Kennedy was about the only one in the room opposed to World War III.

'Go in there and frig around with the missiles, you're screwed'

The moment general mocked JFK behind his back at the height of Cuban Missile Crisis caught on tape

By DANIEL BATES
The Mail
24 September 2012

It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nation was supposed to be pulling together.

But John F Kennedy’s top generals were actually bad-mouthing him behind his back - whilst standing in the White House.

When the former US President left the room Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup said that Mr Kennedy was doing things ‘piecemeal’ and needed a talking to.

SNIP...

But the tapes reveal that after Mr Kennedy and Defence Secretary Robert McNamara went out the room, General Shoup launched into his own tirade - without realising the tape was still running.

CONTINUED...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2207946/Revealed-JFKs-stabbing-generals-mocked-President-battled-avoid-regarded-trigger-happy-Americans-lost-Berlin.html

“We were at war with the national security people.” -- Arthur Schlesinger, quoted by Wilmer Thomas and related to Joan Mellen. SOURCE: https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Whispers_from_the_Silent_Generation.html

[bemildred]

4. Yep. And we still have them today too. nt

[Octafish]

9. Absolutely. Some of them even talk war while wearing civilian duds.

Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?

Talking heads like former General Jack Keane are all over the news media fanning fears of IS. Shouldn’t the public know about their links to Pentagon contractors?

By Lee Fang
The Nation, SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as IS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle IS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane’s case, they will make more vague demands, such as for “offensive” air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on IS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.

 Keane has appeared on Fox News at least nine times over the last two months to promote the idea that the best way to stop IS is through military action—in particular, through air strikes deep into IS-held territory. In one of the only congressional hearings about IS over the summer, Keane was there to testify and call for more American military engagement. On Wednesday evening, Keane declared President Obama’s speech on defeating IS insufficient, arguing that a bolder strategy is necessary. “I truly believe we need to put special operation forces in there,” he told host Megyn Kelly.

Left unsaid during his media appearances (and left unmentioned on his congressional witness disclosure form) are Keane’s other gigs: as special adviser to Academi, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater; as a board member to tank and aircraft manufacturer General Dynamics; a “venture partner” to SCP Partners, an investment firm that partners with defense contractors, including XVionics, an “operations management decision support system” company used in Air Force drone training; and as president of his own consulting firm, GSI LLC.

CONTINUED...

https://www.thenation.com/article/whos-paying-pro-war-pundits/

Paid to stand watch over imagined and invented enemies to the defense budget and safeguard the bean counters and their programs cough war profiteering, comrades 'n' colleagues 'n' such.

[erronis]

18. Thank you for this background info. We all know that there is $$$ to be made

in wars (declared and not.) But having some info on those people who stand to profit from war is very useful.

[Octafish]

33. War is a profit center for Wall Street

...where the really Big Bucks go to get made.

Sometimes a fortune off war rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.

Note some interesting ties to the subject this on that General Walker fellah. The guy's almost forgotten these days, but was the rage in Dixie and of the rightwing nutjobs at the John Birch Society, founded by Fred Koch.

From 2005: Know your BFEE: War Profiteers

[gilpo]

21. Horrible...

My grandfather really detested the joint chiefs under Kennedy. He wrote about it in his memoirs and did not have kind words for them. They really tried hard to maneuver Kennedy into war. So glad people like Gilpatric were there to counsel caution.

[Octafish]

31. Thank you for the important history!

On Roswell Gilpatric, the Assistant Secretary of Defense: "Kennedy sensed McNamara would need a strong lieutenant savvy in the ways of Washington."

Regarding JFK and war in Vietnam:

The view that Kennedy might have withdrawn from Vietnam in a second term was shared by two other well-informed colleagues and friends of President Kennedy. McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, told an audience at the Kennedy Library, “The president personally disclosed his intention to disengage from Vietnam in his second term.” Michael Forrestal, who worked for Bundy on the National Security Council staff and had responsibility for Vietnam, told a CBS interviewer that in his last conversation with JFK, twenty-four hours before the president’s death, JFK said, “We have to start a plan for what we are going to do now in South Vietnam. I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, and what we thought we were doing and what we now think we can do. I even want to think about whether we should be there.” -- from Salon review of "The Last Two Great Presidents" by Godfrey Hodgson.

SOURCE: http://www.salon.com/2015/06/07/the_60s_great_what_if_what_would_john_f_kennedy_have_done_about_vietnam/

Thank you for sharing that important history, gilpo. We owe your late grandfather our infinite thanks.

[gilpo]

32. I only wish i got to know him better

He died while I was in college and he didn't relate well to children. We have a family friend who like to relate a story about me as a child. Apparently, I asked once why I had to call Mr. Gilpatric Granddad.

He did relate well to adults and my father enjoyed a good relationship with him until the end. By the time I was old enough for him to be comfortable with me, I had moved west and only saw him at Christmas.

It is a really fortunate thing that Kennedy chose to surround himself with people like him. LeMay would have killed us all.

[erronis]

34. Looking at that photo again, you have to know that JFK was controlled by the brass

"Sure, pretty boy. Say what you want. But if it comes to threatening OUR programs, you will not survive."

Wonder how that has played out with subsequent, and current, presidents.

[Octafish]

39. Kennedy stood up to them and made clear who was boss.

PC96 PT boat officers Reed, Kennedy, Ross, and Fay in South Pacific, 1943...



JFK, FDR and 'Seven Days in May'

By Lisa Pease
ConsortiumNews, February 24, 2009

EXCERPT...

The film "Seven Days in May" began as a novel by Fletcher Knebel, inspired to a great degree by Knebel's conversations with Gen. Curtis LeMay, President Kennedy's contentious Air Force Chief of Staff who was furious at Kennedy for not sending in full military support during the Bay of Pigs incident.

Additionally, LeMay infamously argued during the Cuban Missile Crisis for a preemptive nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union, a move Kennedy abhorred.

One of Kennedy's friends, Paul Fay, Jr., wrote in his book The Pleasure of His Company how one summer weekend in 1962, one of Kennedy's friends bought Knebel's book to his attention, and Kennedy read the book that night.

The next day, Kennedy discussed the plot with friends, who wanted to know if Kennedy felt such a scenario was possible. Bear in mind this was after the Bay of Pigs but before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"It's possible," Kennedy acknowledged. "It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness.

“Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, 'Is he too young and inexperienced?'

“The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment."

After a moment, Kennedy continued. "Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen."

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/022409a.html

[pa28]

2. Hopefully they'll name the person who issued the order.

That part of the story should come out.

[Octafish]

5. Me, too. I'd like to know who went around the President's back or whether it was an 'accident.'

The report says that whoever ordered the strike -- or however the "mistake" happened -- had targeted "non-belligerant" nations.

Why the government should look for and release records. Immediately. Now wheelchair-bound, Bordne has tried, thus far without success, to track down records related to the incident on Okinawa. He contends that an inquest was conducted and each launch officer questioned. A month or so later, Bordne says, they were called upon to participate in the court martial of the major who issued the launch orders. Bordne says Capt. Bassett, in the only breach of his own secrecy command, told his crew that the major was demoted and forced to retire at the minimum service period of 20 years, which he was on the verge of fulfilling anyway. No other actions were taken—not even commendations for the launch officers who had prevented a nuclear war. -- Aaron Tovish, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[jwirr]

8. The personal facts of the major ow wanted them to launch

could actually be enough today with our internet resources to identify this man. How many majors were court marshaled and demoted in 1972? Stationed in Okinawa? Forced to retire and just completing his 20 years.

I would think that info would be enough to find out and expose this man.

[Octafish]

12. That is a great idea, jwirr.

One typo: this took place in 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Who was the Major?
Who ordered the Major to launch his flight of nuclear cruise missiles?
Who else was in the chain of command?
Who had authorization to issue launch orders?
Why were the orders issued? By mistake or intentionally?
How was the decision to launch reached?
Why did it take a field commander to realize a mistaken order had been given?
Why did his commanders not discover "the mistake" sooner?

There are a million more questions that we should -- We the People have the right to know -- the answers. It would behoove Congress and the Administration to learn and share the answers.

The Internet may yet save Democracy. Working together online has certainly moved forward understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy in ways unimagined before the Web.

[jwirr]

14. Unfortunately at 74 years and limited knowledge of a computer

someone else besides me will have to pick up the search. I would really love to know the whole story here.

[Octafish]

15. From the Bulletin comments: an Airman who served there linked to this site re Okinawa MACE base...

Lots of background on the place.



498th Tactical Missile Group

Kadena Air Base, Okinawa

http://www.mace-b.com/38TMW/Kadena/kadena-2.htm

From the Bulletin article, Daniel Ellsberg thinks the story is worth formal investigation:

Editor's note: As this article was being considered for publication, Daniel Ellsberg, who was a Rand consultant to the Defense Department at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote a lengthy email message to the Bulletin, at the request of Tovish. The message asserted, in part: "I feel it's urgent to find out whether Bordne's story and Tovish's tentative conclusions from it are true, given the implications of its truth for present dangers, not only past history. And that can't await the 'normal' current handling of a FOIA request by the National Security Archive, or the Bulletin. A congressional investigation will only take place, it appears, if the Bulletin publishes this very carefully hedged report and its call for the elaborate documentation reported to exist from an official inquest to be released from inexcusably (though very predictably) prolonged classification."

During this same time period, Bruce Blair, a research scholar at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, also wrote an email message to the Bulletin. This is the entirety of the message: "Aaron Tovish asked me to weigh in with you if I believe his piece should be published in the Bulletin, or for that matter any outlet. I do believe it should be, even though it has not been fully verified at this stage. It strikes me that a first-hand account from a credible source in the launch crew itself goes a long way toward establishing the plausibility of the account. It also strikes me as a plausible sequence of events, based on my knowledge of nuclear command and control procedures during the period (and later). Frankly, it's not surprising to me either that a launch order would be inadvertently transmitted to nuclear launch crews. It's happened a number of times to my knowledge, and probably more times than I know. It happened at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, when a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order. It happened in the early 1970s when [the Strategic Air Command, Omaha] retransmitted an exercise ... launch order as an actual real-world launch order. (I can vouch for this one personally since the snafu was briefed to Minuteman launch crews soon thereafter.) In both of these incidents, the code check (sealed authenticators in the first incident,and message format validation in the second) failed, unlike the incident recounted by the launch crew member in Aaron's article. But you get the drift here. It just wasn't that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur. One last item to reinforce the point: The closest the US came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the US was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.

I understand and appreciate your editorial cautiousness here. But in my view, the weight of evidence and the legacy of serious nuclear mistakes combine to justify publishing this piece. I think they tip the scales. That's my view, for what it's worth."

In an email exchange with the Bulletin in September, Ota, the Kyodo News senior writer, said he has "100 percent confidence" in his story on Bordne's account of events on Okinawa "even though there are still many missing pieces."

SOURCE: http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826

Incredible on so many levels. Reveltory, as well. Interesting times, ours, jwirr!

[jwirr]

19. And we knew it was dangerous because that clock kept

moving closer but we did not know the half of it. The Pentagon must have really been laughing at the head under the desk exercises.

I live across from the widow of a congressman in the late 1950s and she showed me her bomb shelter. That is one of the ways that I knew how dangerous it was. The thing was fully stocked and supposedly safe. And this was in the middle of Iowa. If it was that dangerous in the middle of Iowa it was dangerous. But you know we were told that the danger came from the USSR. I wonder if they had incidents like these we are talking about also. I assume they did.

I guess we are all just lucky we are here.

[mopinko]

6. interesting comments on this article.

for once it is worthwhile to read the comments.

[Octafish]

10. Very interesting comments.

I'll skip "Dennis Fitzsimmons," the guy from 1965, and go straight to "peterf28":

I was there in 1962 and it happened exactly as described here . Sgt. Peter Fiortino .

I imagine his world is turned upside down today. Until I learn otherwise, Sgt. Fiortino also is a hero.

[G_j]

7. wow!

close call..

[Octafish]

11. DCI Dulles and JCS chair Lemnitzer counseled JFK launch all-out attack on USSR in 1961.

They said that the best time for attack was "sometime in the fall of 1963," ensuring the nation's maximum nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. To them, an all-out surprise nuclear attack would end communism, once and for all. The thought that nuclear war might end us "forever," too, must not have occurred to them.

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.

CONTINUED...

http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963

Makes one see where they got the idea for "Better Dead than Red."

The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War

by Ira Chernus
Common Dreams
March 18, 2008

Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it's time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying "he would rather be atomized than communized," reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of "national security," and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.

From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: "Russia is definitely out to communize the world....Now we face a battle to extinction." On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. "toward total socialism."

SNIP…

For Eisenhower, the point of amassing a huge nuclear arsenal was not to deter war but to win it. This was enshrined as official policy in NSC 5810/1: "The United States must make clear its determination to prevail if general war occurs." The only meaningful war aim, he told the NSC, was "to achieve a victory." He described his war plan as "Hit the guy fast with all you've got if he jumps on you"; "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket."

SNIP…

Eisenhower assumed that a post-holocaust America would be a totalitarian state, ruled by martial law. But he worried about (among other things) what would happen to the credit structure of the country and how to print and sell war bonds to finance the next war if Washington were destroyed. At one NSC meeting he complained that if the President and the Vice President were "knocked off," the "damnable" law of succession would result in the Democrats (he called them "the other team&quot taking the White House. "To assure against that happening, the President thought the Vice President should be put in cotton batting."

SNIP…

And we ignore it at our peril, because it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would "push whole stack of chips into the pot" and "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket"; who would "shoot your enemy before he shoots you"; who believed that the U.S. could "pick itself up from the floor" and win a nuclear war, even though "everybody is going crazy," as long as "only" 25 or 30 American cities got "shellacked" and nobody got too "hysterical."

CONTINUED…

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/18/7742

Besides those cockroaches crawling out with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld from the undermountain secret command bunker, there might not be many Americans around after hitting them with "everything in the bucket," but, hey! As Eisenhower and crazy Gen. Powers said, even if only one American survives and no Russians, "We win!"

[G_j]

13. infinitely scarier than any Halloween story.. nt

[jwirr]

16. I have read Ike's MIC statement many times and each time

I wonder who he really was because the Ike in this article is the one I knew. But there were not many of us who understood that. When he was elected I was one high school student of four in a high school of 200 that worked for Stevenson.

[MisterP]

25. "At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power

[LongTomH]

17. Wasn't there another incident involving a Soviet submarine commander, during the same crisis?

[Octafish]

20. ''Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.''

Good memory, yours, LongTomH! Links from The Intercept article on the Okinawa incident:

If the story is true, Bassett is a hero on par with Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, both mid-ranking Soviet military officers who prevented the accidental use of Russian nuclear weapons during moments of excruciating U.S.-Soviet tension.

Petrov did it later, when Pruneface Reagan was joking about "the bombing begins in five minutes."

[LongTomH]

26. Thanks Octafish. It's terrifying to think how close we've come to nuclear destruction!!!

[Xipe Totec]

22. Holy Mother of Fuck!

I'm still dizzy from reading this account.

[Octafish]

28. It IS horrifying. One mistake with nuclear weapons can lead to the end of human life on Earth.

That doesn't bother some people.

Reagan Officials on Winnable Nuclear War

" . . . it is possible for any society to survive [a nuclear war] . . . nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem." ----- Charles Kupperman Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA)

Senator Pell: "My question is, in a full nuclear exchange, would a country survive?"
Eugene Rostov (ACDA): "The human race is very resilient, Senator Pell."

"You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you." ----- Vice-President George Bush on how to win a nuclear war

"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around. Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it." ----- T. K. Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense

"The United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally." ----- Colin Gray, Arms Control Adviser

"It would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn't be unmanageable." ----- Louis Giuffrida, Federal Emergency Management Agency

Question: Would democracy and other institutions survive nucear war?
"I think they would eventually, yeah. As I say, the ants eventually build another anthill." ----- William Chipman Federal Emergency Management Agency

SOURCE: http://legalienate.blogspot.com/2011/02/reagan-officials-on-winnable-nuclear.html

Which, knowing what they know, even if ant-like, is criminal.

[Xipe Totec]

29. I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed,...

[Octafish]

37. 50 million killed, tops. Depending on the breeze.

...Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'

"I think that was just a loose comment for his staff guys, because Gen. Tommy Power, his hatchet man in those days, chuckled and he never laughed very much. So I always figured that was a joke between them. But we thought maybe that was serious. To our knowledge we were the only U.S. Air Force crew that had flown an overflight at that point."...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/07/03/stranger-than-strangelove-a-generals-forays-into-the-nuclear-zone/4dc9a919-8d2f-47cb-82ee-e74d9ecc436a/

Roasting chickens in the barnyard.

[LongTomH]

30. This concept of a 'survivable nuclear war' has been part of Pentagon and Republican doctrine.....

........since Ike. A massive investment in civil defense formed a major part of General Daniel O. Graham's High Frontier concept in the 1980s, which of course, included Strategic Missile Defense (Star Wars).

[A HERETIC I AM]

44. "That doesn't bother some people"

Over the years I've come to realize that doesn't bother some DU'ers, either.

There are plenty who have posted here that wish for the end of civilization.

[jpak]

23. And in the Atlantic, a Soviet political officer prevented a sub commander from firing

atomic torpedoes at a US Navy ASW group.

I remember the Crisis well, it was terrifying - sonic booms all day and night.

Every time I heard a jet - I was hoping it wouldn't be the Russians...

[Octafish]

35. Gen. Curtis LeMay ordered intrusion missions trying to instigate Soviet response...

...and ulitimately escalate into World War III. A madman. From when Eisenhower was president...

STRANGER THAN 'STRANGELOVE': A GENERAL'S FORAYS INTO THE NUCLEAR ZONE

by Paul Lashmar
Wahington Post, July 3, 1996

EXCERPT...

Austin and his crew were summoned to meet Gen. Le May back in the United States. He wanted to decorate them for bravery.

"He said 'I tried to get you guys a silver star,' but he said 'you gotta explain that to Congress and everybody else in Washington when you do something like that, so here's a couple of DFCs {Distinguished Flying Crosses}, we'll give you for that mission. There wasn't anybody in the room except the wing commander and us three guys, Gen. Le May and his intelligence officer."

It was at this meeting that the question arises about Le May's motives. Hal Austin recalls what happened next:

"Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'

CONTINUED...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/07/03/stranger-than-strangelove-a-generals-forays-into-the-nuclear-zone/4dc9a919-8d2f-47cb-82ee-e74d9ecc436a/

I'm as patriotic as anybody, but really?

[Omaha Steve]

24. "THE MISSILES OF OCTOBER" (1974)

K&R!

[Octafish]

40. Thank you, Omaha Steve! Great historic dramatization.

That is one of my favorite examples of art and history. Unforgettable message about peace over war.

If you enjoyed that film, you might like this from the great DUer MinM:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1418900

Sorry...on phone and can't do all the usual...I'll be back.

[Omaha Steve]

43. I do love "13 Days" too

I remember watching "Missiles of October" the night it premiered.

[FairWinds]

27. Either we abolish war, or it will most assuredly . .

abolish us.

And as these articles demonstrate, war is WAY to
important to be left to the generals.

Consider joining Veterans For Peace

[Octafish]

41. Peace and Prosperity for ALL sounds so...so...foreign to ears in 2015.

Remarks Intended for Delivery to the Texas Democratic State Committee in the Municipal Auditorium in Austin, November 22, 1963

President John F. Kennedy
November 22, 1963

One hundred and eighteen years ago last March, President John Tyler signed the Joint Resolution of Congress providing statehood for Texas. And 118 years ago this month, President James Polk declared that Texas was a part of the Union. Both Tyler and Polk were Democratic Presidents. And from that day to this, Texas and the Democratic Party have been linked in an indestructible alliance--an alliance for the promotion of prosperity, growth, and greatness for Texas and for America.

Next year that alliance will sweep this State and Nation.

The historic bonds which link Texas and the Democratic Party are no temporary union of convenience. They are deeply embedded in the history and purpose of this State and party. For the Democratic Party is not a collection of diverse interests brought together only to win elections. We are united instead by a common history and heritage--by a respect for the deeds of the past and a recognition of the needs of the future. Never satisfied with today, we have always staked our fortunes on tomorrow. That is the kind of State which Texas has always been--that is the kind of vision and vitality which Texans have always possessed--and that is the reason why Texas will always be basically Democratic.

For 118 years, Texas and the Democratic Party have contributed to each other's success. This State's rise to prosperity and wealth came primarily from the policies and programs of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Those policies were shaped and enacted with the help of such men as the late Sam Rayburn and a host of other key Congressmen--by the former Texas Congressman and Senator who serves now as my strong right arm, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson--by your present United States Senator, Ralph Yarborough--and by an overwhelming proportion of Democratic leadership at the State and county level, led by your distinguished Governor, John Connally.

It was the policies and programs of the Democratic Party which helped bring income to your farmers, industries to your cities, employment to your workers, and the promotion and preservation of your natural resources. No one who remembers the days of 5-cent cotton and 30-cent oil will forget the ties between the success of this State and the success of our party.

Three years ago this fall I toured this State with Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Ralph Yarborough as your party's candidate for President. We pledged to increase America's strength against its enemies, its prestige among its friends, and the opportunities it offered to its citizens. Those pledges have been fulfilled. The words spoken in Texas have been transformed into action in Washington, and we have America moving again.

Here in Austin, I pledged in 1960 to restore world confidence in the vitality and energy of American society. That pledge has been fulfilled. We have won the respect of allies and adversaries alike through our determined stand on behalf of freedom around the world, from West Berlin to Southeast Asia--through our resistance to Communist intervention in the Congo and Communist missiles in Cuba--and through our initiative in obtaining the nuclear test ban treaty which can stop the pollution of our atmosphere and start us on the path to peace. In San José and Mexico City, in Bonn and West Berlin, in Rome and County Cork, I saw and heard and felt a new appreciation for an America on the move--an America which has shown that it cares about the needy of its own and other lands, an America which has shown that freedom is the way to the future, an America which is known to be first in the effort for peace as well as preparedness.

In Amarillo, I pledged in 1960 that the businessmen of this State and Nation--particularly the small businessman who is the backbone of our economy--would move ahead as our economy moved ahead. That pledge has been fulfilled. Business profits--having risen 43 percent in 2 years--now stand at a record high; and businessmen all over America are grateful for liberalized depreciation for the investment tax credit, and for our programs to increase their markets at home as well as abroad. We have proposed a massive tax reduction, with particular benefits for small business. We have stepped up the activities of the Small Business Administration, making available in the last 3 years almost $50 million to more than 1,000 Texas firms, and doubling their opportunity to share in Federal procurement contracts. Our party believes that what's good for the American people is good for American business, and the last 3 years have proven the validity of that proposition.

In Grand Prairie, I pledged in 1960 that this country would no longer tolerate the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized nation in the world. That pledge has been and is being fulfilled. In less than 3 years our national output will shortly have risen by a record $100 billion--industrial production is Up 22 percent, personal income is up 16 percent. And the Wall Street Journal pointed out a short time ago that the United States now leads most of Western Europe in the rate of business expansion and the margin of corporate profits. Here in Texas--where 3 years ago at the very time I was speaking, real per capita personal income was actually declining as the industrial recession spread to this State--more than 200,000 new jobs have been created, unemployment has declined, and personal income rose last year to an all time high. This growth must go on. Those not sharing in this prosperity must be helped. And that is why we have an accelerated public works program, an area redevelopment program, and a manpower training program, to keep this and other States moving ahead. And that is why we need a tax cut of $11 billion, as an assurance of future growth and insurance against an early recession. No period of economic recovery in the peacetime history of this Nation has been characterized by both the length and strength of our present expansion--and we intend to keep it going.

In Dallas, I pledged in 1960 to step up the development of both our natural and our human resources. That pledge has been fulfilled. The policy of "no new starts" has been reversed. The Canadian River project will provide water for 11 Texas cities. The San Angelo project will irrigate some 10,000 acres. We have launched 10 new watershed projects in Texas, completed 7 others, and laid plans for 6 more. A new national park, a new wildlife preserve, and other navigation, reclamation, and natural resource projects are all under way in this State. At the same time we have sought to develop the human resources of Texas and all the Nation, granting loans to 17,500 Texas college students, making more than $17 million available to 249 school districts, and expanding or providing rural library service to 600,000 Texas readers. And if this Congress passes, as now seems likely, pending bills to build college classrooms, increase student loans, build medical schools, provide more community libraries, and assist in the creation of graduate centers, then this Congress will have done more for the cause of education than has been done by any Congress in modern history. Civilization, it was once said, is a race between education and catastrophe--and we intend to win that race for education.

In Wichita Falls, I pledged in 1960 to increase farm income and reduce the burden of farm surpluses. That pledge has been fulfilled. Net farm income today is almost a billion dollars higher than in 1960. In Texas, net income per farm consistently averaged below the $4,000 mark under the Benson regime; it is now well above it. And we have raised this income while reducing grain surpluses by one billion bushels. We have, at the same time, tackled the problem of the entire rural economy, extending more than twice as much credit to Texas farmers under the Farmers Home Administration, and making more than 100 million dollars in REA loans. We have not solved all the problems of American agriculture, but we have offered hope and a helping hand in place of Mr. Benson's indifference.

In San Antonio, I pledged in 1960 that a new administration would strive to secure for every American his full constitutional rights. That pledge has been and is being fulfilled. We have not yet secured the objectives desired or the legislation required. But we have, in the last 3 years, by working through voluntary leadership as well as legal action, opened more new doors to members of minority groups--doors to transportation, voting, education, employment, and places of public accommodation--than had been opened in any 3-year or 30-year period in this century. There is no noncontroversial way to fulfill our constitutional pledge to establish justice and promote domestic tranquillity, but we intend to fulfill those obligations because they are right.

In Houston, I pledged in 1960 that we would set before the American people the unfinished business of our society. That pledge has been fulfilled. We have undertaken the first full-scale revision of our tax laws in 10 years. We have launched a bold new attack on mental illness, emphasizing treatment in the patient's own home community instead of some vast custodial institution. We have initiated a full-scale attack on mental retardation, emphasizing prevention instead of abandonment. We have revised our public welfare programs, emphasizing family rehabilitation instead of humiliation. And we have proposed a comprehensive realignment of our national transportation policy, emphasizing equal competition instead of regulation. Our agenda is still long, but this country is moving again.

In El Paso, I pledged in 1960 that we would give the highest and earliest priority to the reestablishment of good relations with the people of Latin America. We are working to fulfill that pledge. An area long neglected has not solved all its problems. The Communist foothold which had already been established has not yet been eliminated. But the trend of Communist expansion has been reversed. The name of Fidel Castro is no longer feared or cheered by substantial numbers in every country. And contrary to the prevailing predictions of 3 years ago, not another inch of Latin American territory has fallen prey to Communist control. Meanwhile, the work of reform and reconciliation goes on. I can testify from my trips to Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Costa Rica that American officials are no longer booed and spat upon south of the border. Historic fences and friendships are being maintained. Latin America, once the forgotten stepchild of our aid programs, now receives more economic assistance per capita than any other area of the world. In short, the United States is once more identified with the needs and aspirations of the people to the south, and we intend to meet those needs and aspirations.

In Texarkana, I pledged in 1960 that our country would no longer engage in a lagging space effort. That pledge has been fulfilled. We are not yet first in every field of space endeavor, but we have regained worldwide respect for our scientists, our industry, our education, and our free initiative.

In the last 3 years, we have increased our annual space effort to a greater level than the combined total of all space activities undertaken in the 1950's. We have launched into earth orbit more than 4 times as many space vehicles as had been launched in the previous 3 years. We have focused our wide-ranging efforts around a landing on the moon in this decade. We have put valuable weather and communications satellites into actual operation. We will fire this December the most powerful rocket ever developed anywhere in the world. And we have made it clear to all that the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in outer space. Texas will play a major role in this effort. The Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston will be the cornerstone of our lunar landing project, with a billion dollars already allocated to that center this year. Even though space is an infant industry, more than 3,000 people are already employed in space activities here in Texas, more than $100 million of space contracts are now being worked on in this State, and more than 50 space-related firms have announced the opening of Texas offices. This is still a daring and dangerous frontier; and there are those who would prefer to turn back or to take a more timid stance. But Texans have stood their ground on embattled frontiers before, and I know you will help us see this battle through.

In Fort Worth, I pledged in 1960 to build a national defense which was second to none--a position I said, which is not "first, but," not "first, if," not "first, when," but first--period. That pledge has been fulfilled. In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20 percent; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent. We can truly say today, with pride in our voices and peace in our hearts, that the defensive forces of the United States are, without a doubt, the most powerful and resourceful forces anywhere in the world.

Finally, I said in Lubbock in 1960, as I said in every other speech in this State, that if Lyndon Johnson and I were elected, we would get this country moving again. That pledge has been fulfilled. In nearly every field of national activity, this country is moving again--and Texas is moving with it. From public works to public health, wherever Government programs operate, the past 3 years have seen a new burst of action and progress--in Texas and all over America. We have stepped up the fight against crime and slums and poverty in our cities, against the pollution of our streams, against unemployment in our industry, and against waste in the Federal Government. We have built hospitals and clinics and nursing homes. We have launched a broad new attack on mental illness and mental retardation. We have initiated the training of more physicians and dentists. We have provided 4 times as much housing for our elderly citizens, and we have increased benefits for those on social security.

Almost everywhere we look, the story is the same. In Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in the councils of the world and in the jungles of far-off nations, there is now renewed confidence in our country and our convictions.

For this country is moving and it must not stop. It cannot stop. For this is a time for courage and a time for challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a party is not to our party alone, but to the Nation, and, indeed., to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.

So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause--united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future--and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.

SOURCE: JFK Presidential Library

PS: Thank you for grokking, FairWinds.

[Generic Other]

36. Simply nightmarish.

Sounds like Capt. Bassett should have been awarded every medal the military has.

What other secrets like this are buried like time bombs within the government archives?

[Octafish]

47. Every medal, each with a few oak leaf clusters.

The Japan Times quoted Airman Bordne and two colleagues in 2012 and found some hidden history: the USA had moved these early cruise missiles onto Okinawa, where they were targeted on China and some points of far Eastern USSR. The China angle is interesting, showing how the CIA-Pentagon really wanted to wipe out the commies even if it meant destroying the world. Placing these weapons in a forward position, most importantly, foreshadowed what the USSR would do in a Cuba a short time later.

Okinawa’s first nuclear missile men break silence

BY JON MITCHELL
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES, JUL 8, 2012

In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of nuclear war after American spy planes discovered that the Kremlin had stationed medium-range atomic missiles on the communist island of Cuba in the Caribbean, barely over the horizon from Florida.

The weapons placed large swaths of the U.S. — including Washington, D.C. — within range of attack and sparked a two-week showdown between the superpowers that Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most dangerous moment in human history.”

Six months prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, a parallel drama had played out on the other side of the world as the U.S. brought near-identical missiles to the ones the Russians stationed on Cuba to another small island — Okinawa.

While the full facts of that deployment have still not officially been disclosed, now for the first time three of the U.S. Air Force’s nuclear pioneers have broken the silence about Okinawa’s secret missiles, life within the bunkers and a military miscalculation of apocalyptic proportions — the targeting of unaligned China.

John Bordne, Larry Havemann and Bill Horn were all born during the early days of World War II, but their motivations in joining the U.S. Air Force were very different. Coming from a family steeped in military tradition, Bordne signed up out of a sense of patriotism. Havemann, a laboratory technician, saw the air force as a means to secure a stable income for his family. For Horn, the military offered an escape route from impoverished West Virginia. “Besides, I liked the color of the uniform,” he says.

Soon after joining the air force, these three men from contrasting backgrounds were assigned to the 498th Tactical Missile Group and sent to Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado. There, they first set eyes on the latest weapon in their nation’s nuclear arsenal — the TM-76 Mace. A progeny of the V-1 “doodlebug” rockets that the Nazis rained down on Britain during World War II, the 13-meter-long Mace missiles weighed 8 tons and cost $500,000 each. Packed into the missile’s guts was a 1.1-megaton nuclear warhead that, at over 75 times the ferocity of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, could obliterate everything within a 5-km radius, create a crater 20 stories deep and irradiate the landscape for decades to come.

“For such a horrendous weapon, it was very unimposing,” recalls Horn. “It reminded me of a silver hotdog with wings.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/07/08/general/okinawas-first-nuclear-missile-men-break-silence/#.VjbzZ7erS00

Capt. Bassett deserves every medal in the book, just for remembering DEFCON1 was prerequisite for launch. Everybody else always wants to shoot first and ask questions later. With nukes, though, there would never be a later. As you know, Generic Other, there wouldn't be anybody around to ask.

[eridani]

38. Close calls on the Russian end as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early warning system of the Soviet Union twice reported the launch of American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States. These missile attack warnings were correctly identified as a false alarm by Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack based on erroneous data on the United States and its NATO allies, which would have likely resulted in nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had malfunctioned.

And in 1995--
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/25/how-nuclear-near-miss-95-would-be-disaster-today

20 years ago today — the launch of a lone scientific rocket from a small island off the northwest coast of Norway set off Russia’s nuclear attack early warning system.

As the rocket took off, it initially passed above the horizon of the curved earth into the field of view of Russian radar. After the motor shut down, the rocket then coasted to higher altitudes — into the middle of the major attack corridor between the US intercontinental ballistic missile fields at Grand Forks, N.D., and Moscow. Unknown to the scientists who launched it, one of the rocket’s stages finished its powered flight at an altitude and speed comparable to that expected from a Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile. This combination of events exactly fit the template of an attack scenario under which nuclear weapons are intentionally exploded at high altitudes so as to blind early warning radars before a major bombardment of Russian nuclear forces.

The most immediate explanation for what went wrong that day appears to be serious shortfalls in the Russians’ detection apparatus. But the underlying root cause stems from Russian paranoia. Fears created and bolstered by the relentless, obsessive — and ongoing — American nuclear force modernization program. This initiative was, and remains today, heavily focused on increasing the killing power of each deployed US nuclear warhead, producing and reaffirming concerns by Russian military analysts and leaders that the United States might truly be preparing to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.

What happened after these initially ambiguous events has been a source of extensive speculation in the West. Fortunately, political tensions between Russia and the United States and Europe at the time of the incident were very low, but it is known that the alarm caused Russia’s then leader, Boris Yeltsin, to be called and kept closely informed by the Russian military leadership while the rocket was tracked until it reached and passed its maximum altitude of 1,400 kilometers.

[Octafish]

45. Oh well. Secret Government plans to survive. The rest of us, not so much.

Thank you for the important examples from history, eridani. Perhaps in the future we won't be so lucky, certain players hope.

How the Doomsday Project Led to Warrantless Surveillance and Detention after 9/11

Nov 13, 2014 by Peter Dale Scott

EXCERPT...

Since World War II, secrecy has been used to accumulate new covert bureaucratic powers under the guise of emergency planning for disasters, planning known inside and outside the government as the “Doomsday Project.”

Known officially (and misleadingly) as “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, the Doomsday Project, under the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others, on 9/11 became the vehicle for a significant change of government. The extreme repressive powers accumulated under the guise of the Doomsday Project were first developed to control the rest of the world. Now, to an unprecedented extent, America itself is being treated as an occupied territory.

In 1994, Tim Weiner reported in The New York Times that “The Doomsday Project” had “less than six months to live.” (1) Weiner’s language was technically justifiable, but also very misleading. In fact COG planning now simply continued with a new target: terrorism. On the basis of Weiner’s article, the first two books to discuss COG planning, by James Bamford and James Mann, both reported that COG planning had been abandoned. (2)

What Weiner and these authors did not report was that in the final months of Reagan’s presidency the purpose of COG planning had officially changed: it was no longer for arrangements “after a nuclear war,” but for any “national security emergency.” This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” (3)

In this way a totally legitimate program dating back to Eisenhower, of planning extraordinary emergency measures for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, was now converted to confer equivalent secret powers on the White House for anything it considered an emergency.

Cheney and Rumsfeld in from the Start

From its beginning in 1982, two of the key planners on the secret COG planning committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the same two men who implemented COG on 9/11. (4) The committee had been established by Reagan under a secret executive order, NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982. Despite what Weiner implied, the committee continued to meet without interruption until the George W. Bush presidency in 2001. (5)

An expanded application of COG was apparently envisaged as early as 1984, when, according to Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency… to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of thousands of un-documented aliens in case of an unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex 84, called for the suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. (6)

1In other words, extreme measures, designed originally to deal with an externally directed and devastating nuclear attack, were being secretly modified to deal whenever desired with domestic dissenters: a situation that still pertains to today. (7)

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/11/13/doomsday-project-led-warrantless-surveillance-detention-911

When September 11 happened, no Democrats were invited to the safety of the undisclosed location with Cheney and the BFEE. Old news to you, eridani. Missing from history and down the Memory Hole for America.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5027094

[MowCowWhoHow III]

42. Singer James Blunt claims he Stopped America From Starting World War III in 1999

This James Blunt:

Singer James Blunt 'prevented World War III'

Singer James Blunt has told the BBC how he refused an order to attack Russian troops when he was a British soldier in Kosovo. Blunt said he was willing to risk a court martial by rejecting the order from a US General.

But he was backed by British Gen Sir Mike Jackson, who said: "I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III."

Blunt was ordered to seize an airfield, but the Russians had got there first.

In an interview with BBC Radio 5 live, broadcast on Sunday, he said: "I was given the direct command to overpower the 200 or so Russians who were there.

"I was the lead officer with my troop of men behind us...

"The soldiers directly behind me were from the Parachute Regiment, so they're obviously game for the fight.

"The direct command [that] came in from Gen Wesley Clark was to overpower them. Various words were used that seemed unusual to us. Words such as 'destroy' came down the radio."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050

[Octafish]

46. That is an amazing history.

Thank goodness for Blunt. British Gen. Jackson backed him up.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/aug/02/balkans3

Regarding Gen. Clark: I was very surprised to hear he had encouraged rounding up Americans who would dare protest all the wars without end. Internment camps in the age of state terror.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/20/wesley-clark-calls-internment-camps-radicalized-americans