The Okinawa missiles of October 1962 | Hacker News Reader

The Okinawa missiles of October 1962

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278 pointssehugg71 comments

"Why target non-belligerent countries?"

Worth noting that until not long before the Cuban missile crisis there was only one single unconditional plan for the US fighting a nuclear war: the first version of SIOP -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_...

This targeted the Soviets, China, Warsaw Pact countries and even the likes of Yugoslavia and Albania. There was an exchange between General Power and David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps, that went as follows:

"What would happen if Beijing was not fighting; was there an option to leave Chinese targets out of the attack plan?" Power was reported to have said that he hoped no one would think of that "because it would really screw up the plan"—that is, the plan was supposed to be executed as a whole. Apparently Shoup then observed that "any plan that kills millions of Chinese when it isn't even their war is not a good plan. This is not the American way."

Edit: For anyone interested in the Cuban Missile Crisis I can strongly recommend "One Minute To Midnight" by Michael Dobbs - it is full of episodes like this (some even more alarming).

To play devil's advocate that kind of makes sense... in the advent of a nuclear launch you have no idea how other people will respond, and if China et al were to respond it's reasonable to assume it would have been directed at the US (even if the US was not the aggressor). At that point you have to go scorched earth and take out any possible retaliation. It is nuclear war after all, when you're launching an arsenal of 32,000 warheads there's only going to be one survivor at best so you might as well do everything in your power to make sure it's you.

American military planners don't seem to agree with that, since they revised it later on to add options. It looks more likely that the original all-or-nothing SIOP was just an organizational thing due to limited planning resources available. To make a bad and inadequate analogy, it's like writing a computer program that does a bunch of unnecessary work because it's easier and you want to get it out the door. Except instead of wasted CPU cycles, it's millions of lives.

I think this is exactly the case. I do remember reading that early versions of SIOP were designed to be easily triggered by a heavily compromised administration after an attack, so there wasn't any real room for options which would require a more complicated and confusing command protocol than just saying, "go".

Command and Control (I think) touches on the back-and-forth evolution with SIOP between the various branches of military and civilian leadership.

"China et al were to respond it's reasonable to assume it would have been directed at the US"

China didn't have nuclear weapons until '64 and I have no idea who the leaders of Albania were threatening apart from their own unfortunate population.

I think military planners didn't fully understand what it really meant to use nuclear weapons until later. Things like tactical weapons (Davy Crockett, Genie missiles) and non-military (Operation Plowshares and the Soviet equivalent) were developed in the 50s and pretty much gone by the late 60s.

Dr. Strangelove (1964) is probably the best documentary you can watch about what "they" thought at the time.

It only makes sense, if you'd put nations and nationalism above everything.

"We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?" - Carl Sagan.

I always thought Sagan would have been the best spokesman, ironically.

Brilliant - that is so obvious but it had never occurred to me "Who speaks for Earth?" - "You do Carl". :-)

He was, once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

"Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser also covers a lot of the close calls and mishaps during the Cold War inside the missile and bomber program. There was a big confluence of technical and policy issues that lead to the inflexible SIOP. First being able to keep target lists up to date and distributing targets to the silos was a big hurdle. Policy wise there was a huge rush to get the SIOP in place so that the looming threat of a Soviet first strike could actually be countered, because without some plan in place the US would be in a huge disarray after the theoretical attack.

General Power was well-known to be batshit fucking insane. Even General LeMay thought he was unstable and aggressive, and LeMay himself was the guy who oversaw the war against the Japanese Home Islands. When the guy who burned the best part of a million people alive with firebombings and then nuked the remains thinks you're a bit of a loose cannon, well...

He is often viewed as the likely inspiration for Gen. Buck Turgidson in the film Dr. Strangelove. A quote from Power, when the RAND Corporation raised the proposal of a counterforce strike instead of striking at Soviet cities:

  "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea
  is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans 
  and one Russian left alive, we win!"

In the words of Gen. Horace Wade, a subordinate who served under Gen Powers:

  I used to worry about General Power. I used to worry that General Power 
  was not stable. I used to worry about the fact that he had control over
  so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions,
  launch the force. Back in the days before we had real positive control 
  [i.e., PAL locks], SAC had the power to do a lot of things, and it
  was in his hands, and he knew it.

SAC pushed back very strongly against this intrusion. The first Permissive Action Links were installed in 1959 and the bulk of them in 1962, but the 8-digit security codes were set to "0000 0000" until around 1977, because SAC was afraid that they would be unable to fire the weapons if needed.

It's a goddamn miracle we didn't go over the edge, either accidentally or with those guys at the controls. In one case, a B-52 crashed in North Carolina in 1961. The bomb went through its full arming sequence, being stopped only by a single low-voltage switch. That switch later became known for being unreliable and failing to interrupt its signal properly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

The Russians had some close calls of their own, notably when the sun glinted off the clouds and tripped their launch warnings during ABLE ARCHER 83.

I thought it was Jack D. "Purity of Essence" Ripper who was based on Power.

Yeah, in the movie Buck was one of the "better" (or less bad) guys, although a bit crazy, too.

You can think of them like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde if you like.

Both share an innate conviction that nuclear war can be successfully waged. Buck thinks that it'll only "muss our hair a little bit", and argues against calling the Premier because that will end their chances for a preemptive attack. Ripper said the same in his message to the War Room - that Communism can be wiped out with a pre-emptive strike and that we will prevail in our Purity of Essence. He tells Mandrake that he has faith that the generals will do the rational thing and launch.

Both Buck and Ripper display paranoia of the "Rooskies". Buck opposes letting the Russian Ambassador into the War Room, continually agitates against any trust in the Russians, and goes so far as to plant a tiny camera on the Ambassador to try and get him ejected for "taking pictures of the big board!". Ripper, of course, has devolved into outright schizophrenia over the International Communist Conspiracy and the world at large. The Redcoats are coming, Mandrake!

I realize those are very common themes that Cold War generals might exhibit. However, they are fundamentally very similar characters who really only differ in their motivations by degree and sanity. In a sense, Ripper asks us what would happen if Buck went off the deep end.

At that time, a head of the SAC (like Power) very much had the power to start World War III before anyone could even stop him, just as Ripper did.

I wonder how much of this was a scare tactic. In theory the USSR would be more apprehensive if they believed the man in control of the US weapons was a bit crazy.

That was Nixon's "Madman Theory":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

Precisely. Comes from games theory: if the other guy is thought to be irrational, it really backs you into a bit of a corner, playing it as safe as possible.

Nixon had bombers flying to the edge of Soviet airspace, 24/7, all fully loaded, all to make the Russians think he was insanely aggressive.

Not that it makes it a iota better, but both parties ran bomber patrols back in the day.

The obvious problem here is of course the other side might fully believe you are so unhinged that an attack is only a matter of time (not "if" but "when") and launch a pre-emptive attack at you.

With the Soviet memory of Hitler's shenanigans, the madman tactic was incredibly destabilizing.

There's probably a touch of that. But the adult supervision (LeMay) was pretty touched himself. People were numbers, and they were more than willing, eager even to kill millions.

In the context of preparing for nuclear war you kind of had to be on some level cold and calculating about millions of deaths. Deterrence only really works if both sides know the other will retaliate, or at least remains unconvinced that the other wouldn't. The military had to plan for the worst and with nuclear war the /best/ outcome is millions dead and some swaths of land are unusable long times.

No doubt. But his attitudes reflected in more "conventional" settings as well. The firebombing of Japan, the Vietnam bombings, etc. He may have been the man we needed then, but he was a brutal sob.

If its any consolation, the Soviet Union was grossly outmatched in strategic weapons in 1962. An all out war wouldn't have ended civilization (or probably most of the US, realistically).Things would've been more worrisome later on in the Cold War.

People interested in the Cuban Missile Crisis may like to read this:

http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=...

It's an extremely well written and thoroughly researched what-if of what might happen in a Cuban Missile Crisis gone horribly wrong --- and quite thoroughly chilling.

The entire thing is worth a read, but here's a short summary:

John Bordne claims that missile launch crews in okinawa received nuclear missile launch orders via calm encoded voice comms, which seemed suspect, since they were given at defcon 2, not defcon 1. According to the claim they ended up contacting the sender of the codes and requested codes to either stand down or upgrade defcon, at which point the sender issued stand down with considerable stress in his voice. Bordne also claims that to his knowledge no real consequences for this ever happened.

He's asking for corroboration to help with his own old memories and to straighten out history.

My own thoughts separately: If this is all correctly remembered and truthful, it could mean that someone managed to sneak those codes into the command chain and the person passing them on wasn't even aware they were the launch codes. In that case i would suspect any consequences, if they happened, to be kept quiet on as well.

Or it's super mundane and just a coincidence/typo.

I'm curious what the actual protocol was for defining the codes. Could it have been an accidental collision? depending on the codes, what is the probability all three matched?

You have to wonder if there was some sort of covert op in play, and cooler minds prevailed (Capt bassets' rigorous adherence to protocol maybe was not planned for by the attacker. Refusal to launch at defcon2, which could have been overlooked by a less attentive sr official).

What sort of covert op? Who would want to start WWIII?

In the decade or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis there were some US military leaders who thought that a "preventative" attack on the Soviets was a good idea - by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the public estimates of Soviet capabilities were so high (overestimated by a factor of 100 in some cases) that people probably thought it was too late for such an attack.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2005/03/13/to-be-sorted/the...

it's probably crack-pot conspiracy theory, but you could definitely sense there were elements of our government who thought a pre-emptive strike to level russia/china in one swift move would be agreeable. Perhaps they thought they would not be capable of retaliating, or the retaliatory strikes would not be nearly as impactful?

I'm not suggesting that is a rational approach, but I've heard crazier things uttered in terms of foreign policy even in modern day (e.g.: nuke entire regions, turn them into glass).

It terrifies me to no end that people could ascend into power with such ideas, but we'd be fools to think it doesn't happen. Look at any big org (company/government, whatever).. the best and brightest are not always the ones being promoted up, -- it's often the sociopaths.

I believe the thinking among many at the time was that war with the Soviets would result in "acceptable" losses to the US i.e. 20 million Americans dead, give or take. This was probably not too far off given extremely limited Soviet capabilities at the time. (Europe would have fared far worse, but I don't know that they cared too much.) There's a scene in Dr. Strangelove where this is advocated, and I think it's reasonably true-to-life.

> Bordne also claims that to his knowledge no real consequences for this ever happened.

Well, the sender in question was allegedly court-martialed.

Did I miss that in the article? Or do you have another source?

You missed it.

Ah, found it. Thanks.

real consequences. If the story as told is correct the sender was initially not aware they'd sent missile launch codes.

I'd also include that they received the coded message twice showing that it's unlikely it was misheard or misread on either end. That was my initial reaction/theory, that the code was close to the confirmed order but one side messed up some how. With a second confirmation it seems like the 'NOP' (dummy) code either accidentally matched the LAUNCH code or the correct code was given to (or procured by) the major who transmitted the mid-shift messages.

It's an interesting question of how do you ensure you never accidentally transmit the correct code without the sender knowing the correct code and being able to command a launch single-handedly. Even if the code is really long, generating random NOP codes doesn't give the level of safety I'd like when accidental collisions can end the world.

Maybe the book was sorted alphabetically, such that the code for LAUNCH MISSILES was listed next to the code for LUNCH TIME or something.

My understanding is that the correct launch authorization code would be locked in a safe until the command post had received a message authorizing them to launch. It's safes and authorization confirmations all the way down as I understand it.

I am sure the system was designed to resist intentional manipulation by intermediates, but what about plain old telephone-game mishaps? If LAUNCH and LUNCH TIME are represented by one-time-pad blobs that are right next to each other on a list, it doesn't matter how many two-person-locks or feet of steel prevent the operator from learning which blob is the LAUNCH blob because an off-by-one mistake is still easy to make as ever.

I was saying that the launch codes would only be available if the CP had received their own launch codes and there wouldn't be a list with the launch codes and lunch codes to make that error.

The question is whether the codes were sufficiently far apart that you couldn't stumble onto one by accident, or whether they were similar enough that you could generate LAUNCH MISSILES by accident with a typo, even if you never went near the safe and had no idea what your message actually meant.

>It's an interesting question of how do you ensure you never accidentally transmit the correct code without the sender knowing the correct code

Use a good hash function and give only the hash to the sender? Before sending, the sender hashes the codes she has and compares the hash with the "hot" hash.

Interesting -- a prior 2012 story relating to Bordne. I guess in hind sight he knew more than he was letting onto then if this all turns out to have some truth to it.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/07/08/general/okinawas...

Bordne also recounted some of it earlier this year in March but it didn't seem to get picked up much:

http://japanfocus.org/events/view/249

edit: Bordne himself posted on another site that this was the crew

  Crew #1 (Wave Makers) (1960 through 1963) Launch Officer - Capt. William Bassett
  Crew Chief SSgt William “Bill” Voorhees
  Mech. #1 A2C Eugene “Geno” Boozer
  Mech. #2 A2C John “JC” Bordne (Guest book signer #135)
  Mech. #3 A2C Michael “Mike” Schaubach
  Mech. #4 A2C William “Bill” O’Hara (Guest book signer #25)
  Mech. #5 A2C Richard “Rick” Marshal

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

Whenever I can spare the time, I try to make mobile apps and computer games. I think it can add value to the world.

But compared to calling the shots in the dark on a imminent nuclear holocaust? Geez louise. If this story is true, this guy did far, far more for the world than any app or gizmo I could hope to see developed by me or others. It seems our destructive capabilities (which are practically infinite) in some sense far outweigh our creative capabilities. It's too bad nobody throws a few million dollars at this guy or his family like money is thrown at promising startups. Even if having saved the world is a sunk benefit (a la sunk cost), it would be well-deserved.

Equally interesting, his Soviet counterpart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

It would be good to have a monument somewhere with the names of as many people as possible who acted sanely during those dangerous days - the least we can do is remember them and take it as a lesson.

A memorial to people who exercised good judgement and common sense in stressful situations would be great. Maybe we could have a reality show about this, to prove to the rest of the world we aren't just a bunch of slobbering troglodytes.

I am actually starting to sort-of observe the Stanislav Petrov Day[0] - 26th of September. It seems worth it to add to the list the Vasili Arkhipov Day, the 27th of October, and John Bordne day, the 28th of October. Maybe we should actually make a list of such days, in memory of people who actually saved (a big part of) the world, or had a significant contribution towards its continued prosperity.

Come to think of it, today's the 27th. Happy Vasili Arkhipov Day, HN!

[0] - http://blog.jaibot.com/there-is-a-button/

This is a fantastic idea, there should definitely be a statue of all the people who prevented World War 3.

Also, Stanislav Petrov prevented nuclear war because he didn't trust the Soviet satellite missile detection system.

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

Perhaps counterintuitively, but I actually find this somewhat reassuring - another example of regular soldiers declining to initiate a nuclear war. Yeah, the magnitude of the mistake is awful, but the final failsafe (ie, human conscience) seems to work. See also Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov, etc.

They were also at the wrong DEFCON level for that kind of order, so protocol acted a partial failsafe too.

But consider survivorship bias.

It seems more like the anthropic principal than survivorship bias -- since we're here talking about it, we must live in a universe where the fail-safes work.

I don't think that even total nuclear war would actually wipe out human life on Earth. Keep in mind, 0.1% of a billion people is a whole million people.

You mean we never think about all of those guys that actually did start a nuclear war?

For those interested, the Eric Schlosser book is a superb, in depth look at the entire history of nuclear control. Very very good read.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser/dp/01...

As many times as the world has come close to nuclear war and mutually assured destruction since the end of WW2, it's actually one of the most reassuring things about humanity that people refused orders to fire missiles every time.

I'm always reminded of "Talking to god..."[1] when I read about these close calls with nuclear weapons. The most important paragraph in the entire short story is the following: "The only ones who reach level two are those who learn to accept and to live with their most dangerous knowledge. Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight. And frankly, they’re the only ones we really want to see leaving their solar systems. Species that haven’t achieved that maturity could not be allowed to infect the rest of the universe, but fortunately that has never required my intervention. The knowledge always does the trick".

1: http://www.fullmoon.nu/articles/art.php?id=tal

If you accept the account in the linked story, this episode itself is a counterexample:

"...the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles..."

Just makes me so very, very glad that the right decisions were made by so many people in those trying times.

I'm sure there are plenty of individual heroes whose small contributions individually and collectively prevented nuclear war that we'll never hear about.

Absolutely incredible. I really hope the Freedom of Information Act requests get somewhere and we get to hear how a screw up of this magnitude happened.

But don't worry, all the people in charge of our nuclear missiles now are constantly caught cheating at their tests.

I believe I read recently the way the military solved this huge scandal is by making the tests easier and simply pass/fail.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/30/22508088-92-nucle...

http://www.defenseone.com/management/2014/04/after-cheating-...

I contact my U.S. Representative requesting the Air Force release records pertaining to the incident. We need to know that facts.

Interesting coincidence – TAC Missileers, "a US Air Force, Cold War veterans group, whose members proudly served our country, as part of the Mace or Matador cruise missile programs." (quoted from their website) is having a reunion next week in Orlando, Florida.

As someone who was stationed on Okinawa some years later, I find this quite interesting and had seen even a few parallels to this story during my time there, albeit not with nuclear warheads involved.

Argh. I wish the game "East vs West" was a reality to test all these things! :D

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

ok, hold on. Could these 1960s era missiles really be retargeted like this? I always assumed that they were programmed for a single target and changing the target was a big deal.

The article does not mention any retargeting.

Didn't it talk about transmission specifying targets to hit?

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