But it is worth considering that insanity has always surrounded nuclear weapons. Perhaps there’s something about the physics of a nuclear weapon, splitting the atom and unleashing the power to destroy worlds. Maybe they cause sanity to split as well.
What else could explain the last few minutes of the pre-nuclear age: Sitting on a mountain in the New Mexico desert, gazing toward Trinity, the first nuclear device, as if taking a cue from the insane doctor himself, Enrico Fermi and others placed bets on whether the explosion would literally set the planet’s atmosphere on fire. Gallows humor indeed.
That was the world’s first nuclear test. The North Koreans have now put four on the board, but they’re way behind this late in the game. After the 1945 Trinity test and the destruction of two Japanese cities, the United States set off 1,053 additional “test” bombs. You know, for science.
Edward Teller, called “The Real Dr. Strangelove,” was the architect of the H-bomb, the “Super” as he called it. Once he’d successfully vaporized Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific, Teller was a staunch supporter of Operation Plowshare, which wanted to use nukes for things like blasting artificial harbors, mining for shale gas (hydro-fracking?) and — I kid you not — using 26 bombs in a line to create a new Panama Canal. There was significant public opposition to this idea.
In 1962, the military decided it wanted to find out what would happen when it shot an H-bomb into the Van Allen magnetic radiation belts that ring the globe. Operation Starfish Prime, conducted in the South Pacific, lit up some serious Northern Lights — it knocked out electricity, telephones, and street lights in Hawaii more than 800 miles away. Oh, and it also knocked out a third of all satellites orbiting Earth, since the electrons released by the blast kept whizzing around the planet for weeks instead of falling to Earth as scientists predicted.
But all the insanity didn’t just happen aloft. The US government accidentally dropped nuclear weapons on South Carolina, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, and Spain. None resulted in a nuclear explosion. In 1961, the Air Force dropped two armed hydrogen bombs on North Carolina. Neither of those went off either. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara coolly reported to Pentagon officials that “by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.”
Such were the perils of the Cold War, that weapons had to be ready to go at a moment’s notice — once proper authorization was issued. Sort of. Declassified documents now tell us that all US nuclear ICMBs for two decades had their launch codes set to 00000000, to ensure that they could be launched quickly enough to end the world.
The launch code numbers were eventually changed, but history proved it wasn’t such a crazy idea. President Clinton famously misplaced the nuclear codes for several months, during his time in the White House. One has to wonder if, in the digital age, the launch passwords are all set to “password.”
Lest we think that nuclear fiascoes are a product of a bygone, Cold War past, consider the recent scandals that led to several soup-to-nuts reviews of the country’s doomsday forces. In 2007, six nuclear tipped missiles went missing for 36 hours when they were accidentally shipped across the country. Another scandal found 98 military missileers cheated on their qualification exams.
Then there’s the unfortunate saga of Major General Michael Carey, who oversaw 450 nuclear-armed ICBMs for the Air Force. He traveled to Moscow for an official trip in 2013 and was drunk a significant portion of the time, according to the Air Force Inspector General’s report. He cavorted with a pair of foreign women, danced on tables, tried to get on stage and play guitar with a band, and “talked loudly about the importance of his position as commander of the only operational nuclear force in the world and that he saves the world from war every day.”
Are we getting what we pay for? Good question. Especially since, despite all the arms reduction treaties, the United States now spends vastly more on its nuclear arsenal than it did during any point in the Cold War. Now that’s crazy.
And all this is only a brief accounting of US-related nuclear hijinks. The Russian government has disclosed very little about its history with such fiascoes. On purpose, that is. In November, Russian state television broadcast a meeting with President Vladimir Putin and several generals. At one point, the camera zoomed in on an open binder and accidentally revealed the design of a secret drone submarine used to deliver nuclear weapons against coastlines. “We hope such a thing will never be repeated,” a chagrined Kremlin spokesman said.
— ALEX KINGSBURY
Alex Kingsbury can be reached at alex.kingsbury@globe.com.