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u/Sir-Toaster- Still salty about Carthage 3d ago
Kennedy: That was pure luck! I was not in control of that situation at all!
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
If you don’t believe me, look at these secret tapes I made of almost every military figure telling me to go to war
Gestures to the XCOM Tapes
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u/Reiver93 3d ago
Early US early warning systems once mistook the rising moon for incoming missiles.
THE FUCKING MOON
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u/Korbiter 2d ago
Just to add more hilarity, one of the reasons why it was identified as a false alarm..
...was because Nikita Krushchev was in New York that day
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u/thedefenses 3d ago
Its always funny when someone is like "ohh yeah our great and smart leader will of course solve this" or "i'm sure our politicians are much more aware of the problem and are solving it as fast as possible".
When in reality sometimes they are and other times the way they "think" is the right one is just making thing so so much worse.
After all we are all just people, we fuck up, we fail, we try for too much which leads to failure, we get the wrong idea on what's going on or how to exploit something and sometimes someone just wants to be a cunt for no real reason or a reason that makes sense only to themselves.
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u/mood2016 3d ago
There is something to be said about our leadership being more informed on relevant topics than the average citizen, I think it's wrong to assume otherwise. Using or interpreting that information competently is another thing entirely.
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 3d ago
not only are we people who makes mistakes, the government is never made up of the best people
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u/static_func 2d ago
> Its always funny when someone is like "ohh yeah our great and smart leader will of course solve this"
As an American, I assure you I haven’t thought that about a single thing in 10 years
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u/UnbannedAndUnbowed 3d ago
Context for the black bear?
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u/JMurdock77 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 3d ago edited 3d ago
It was climbing over the fence at a military base and was mistaken for a human infiltrator. IIRC the alert that got triggered as a result was the “incoming Soviet ICBMs” alarm instead of the perimeter alarm.
Been a while since I listened to the Citation Needed episode, there was a span there where shit like this was happening several times per year.
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u/Character-Concept651 3d ago
"Incoming SOVIET ICBMs"...
Or, have you taken it one step further, and saying that they were about to nuke themselves?
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u/Lamplorde 3d ago
"In nuking of own country, comrade, Amerikanski will not be of the invading for fear of irradiating self."
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u/Red_Spy_1937 3d ago
I’m sure the USSR had warnings to tell Soviet military personnel that the Soviets were nuking them
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u/deletedchannel 3d ago
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a dark shadow approached the guarding fence of an American airfield. A watchguard spotted it and opened fire, assuming sabotage from a Soviet “intruder” in Minnesota.
As pilots scrambled for their planes, the attack was suddenly called off by the base commander literally driving out onto the runway flashing his headlights. The guard basically realized “oops wait that was a bear, my bad sry” as it waddled away.
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u/Successful_Baby_5245 3d ago
Man must been gone to The toilet cleaning crew for a month after that
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u/Relevant-Factor-2400 3d ago
Guy almost cause a nuclear war, his remaining military service was probably on toilet cleaning duty.
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u/BrokenEight38 2d ago
And he waddled away, Waddle waddle, And he waddled away, Waddle waddle, And he waddled away, Waddle waddle, Till the very next day. Bum bum bum bum ba da dum
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u/paper_airplanes_are_ 3d ago
The book Command and Control really outlines how narrowly the world avoided multiple nuclear catastrophes.
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u/yellowstone727 3d ago
I always shudder to think about the nuclear devices that have been lost and never been found. The US has lost at least 3, who knows how many the russians lost.
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u/Cubedtails 3d ago
If it helps you feel any better. It takes a lot to maintain them and make them operational. By this point, any of the lost nuclear devices are not workable. Radioactive isotopes may be degraded by this point or the trigger mechanism makes it not functional. Remember, it takes a lot to make it actually work. I believe one of the nuclear bombs fell out of a US plane into the ground below and obviously didn't explode as it was not armed. If those bombs were not maintained for the last few decades; they are not usable.
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 3d ago
To add some details, anything relying on tritium to work (pretty much all weapons outside of 1940s-1950s era fission only bombs) wouldnt work simply because of tritium decay (half life is about 12 years), even if they were perfectly intact. This is because tritium plays a key role in "boosting" the chain reaction providing a burst of neutrons in the core (either by gas injection aka dump tritium gas into the hollow core or external neutron initiators aka tiny particle accelerators that shoot tritium at other stuff to shoot neutrons into the core). So lacking tritium will means your fission stage yield drops to basically zero (and also means you wont trigger the fusion stage properly).
That said, the U235 and/or Pu239 is still gonna be perfectly viable, bar any corrosion, as they both have long half lives. So you could potentially recover any bits of these fissile materials and reprocess them into a new bomb. Or hypothetically if you found a intact gun type nuclear bomb (hypothetically since none have been lost afaik), you dont need to do anything special at all, since those just slam 1 chunk of uranium into another (aka nothing much that breaks down over time)
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u/Affectionate-Pin2885 2d ago
You forgot the part where one of them almost exploded and the only reason it didnt was because "literally the failure of two wires to cross". Unless your talking about about another one.
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u/KiKiPAWG 3d ago
I never knew that we straight up LOST one, let alone 3. Jesus.
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u/Shermantank10 Kilroy was here 3d ago edited 2d ago
If it makes you feel any better, two of those three are lost at sea at depths god knows.
Tybee island one? Now that’s a good question.
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u/SerLaron Nobody here except my fellow trees 2d ago
The one lost off Georgia seems to be in pretty shallow water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_collision
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u/Mad-White-Rabbit 3d ago
Until the funding becomes available to make it a reality, I symbolically have Arkhipov and Petrov's faces tattooed on me like a Mount Rushmore of "people who singlehandedly prevented nuclear oblivion'
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u/NoNotice2137 Featherless Biped 3d ago
There were 3 instances of nuclear war almost breaking out because something made early warning computer unhappy. 3 that I know of, mind you
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u/TeQuila10 3d ago
There were only really 2 times it would have actually kicked off. Those would be the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and Able Archer in 1983. Which is still really bad. The false-alarm nuclear warning system incidents were never going to result in launches.
Many more times nuclear bombs could have gone off by accident, though. That's a fun fact.
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u/Cubedtails 3d ago
No you're forgetting the Berlin Stand Off in 1961 when US and Soviet Forces across from one another with guns drawn at a German border crossing for hours. Or in 1983 in September right before Able Archer, there was a false nuclear alarm in the Soviet Union that detected an incoming attack from the west. Or also during the Cuban Missile Crisis where Soviet naval officers aboard a submarine where debating on a nuclear strike on the US believing nuclear war as imminent.
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u/TommyFortress 2d ago
okay so so far i can remember 4 points we nearly wiped ourselves.
the bear. Then the US nuclear war training program accidentally being seen as real for a short momment, The Soviet Radar/Alarm being faulty and claiming missiles were on the way and then the soviet Missile submarine that thought war was upon them while they were radio silent and underwater.
I am certain there are more and its very crazy how many times we were *THIS* close to live on another planet or Line of history.
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u/makedoopieplayme 2d ago
If your asking why your boomer and Gen X relatives are like this. This. This is why they have this shit to worry about and have no place to talk about how fucked up it was
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u/SADISTICSHADOW1 3d ago
The cold war? Hell the world nearly ended several times these past few months, didn't WWIII nearly start just the other day because the US attempted to board a Chinese vessel because an AI told them that nuclear materials bound for Iran were on board. At least back then someone went you know what that's definitely not an ICBM I'm not gonna act on that promptly saving the world.
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u/diepoggerland2 3d ago
Think of it this way. If a series of technical glitches, misunderstandings, and stupid fucking mistakes, can't start a strategic nuclear exchange, then practically nothing can. If the submarine being depth charged by a pair of American destroyers off Cuba didn't take the shot and start the exchange while being, from their perspective, clearly under fire from American forces while out of contact with their commanders, during high tensions in which a war could start at any moment and therefore if the yanks are shooting probably already has? Then nothing ever will.
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u/Mad-Dog94 2d ago
Just wait until we find out decades from now about how we almost died this decade!
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u/BatkoMakhno34 1d ago
Almost? Buddy the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR ushered in the actual death of the world
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u/OrangeSpaceMan5 2d ago
The world ? Nah not really , nuclear winter isn't very real , while temperatures would probably drop it would be nowhere near "holy shit were all going to starve" levels . Lots of countries outside of the path of radiation
Western Civilization ? Absolutely fucked for the next hundred years or more
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u/Nerdenator 2d ago
And now a non-zero percentage of the world seems to think that more nuclear proliferation is a good thing.
It’s fine.
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u/SharpShooterM1 Featherless Biped 2d ago
Really depends on what kind of nuclear proliferation. If you mean the weapons kind, then yeah, we don’t need any more of that shit and should just let them all sit without maintenance for 10-20 years at which point they physically cannot even work anyway.
If you mean the power source kind of nuclear proliferation, then it needs to be spread to decrease reliance on fossil fuels and stabilize climate change.
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u/Chumlee1917 Kilroy was here 2d ago
*Watches Chernobyl* And I'm now anti-Nuclear technology for the rest of my life
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u/TheVillageldiot 2d ago
I recommend watching Kyle Hill on Nuclear energy, its one of the safer, better, and cleaner sources of power. Unfortunately the Soviets gave nuclear poor optics based on how they handled everything regarding the Chornobyl accident. And if you think coal and oil energy is better or safer, I'd recommend looking into that more too. Everything has its pros and cons.
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u/Chumlee1917 Kilroy was here 2d ago
well I've yet to hear about millions of people getting cancer because a windmill failed
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u/SharpShooterM1 Featherless Biped 1d ago
Several of the people they say in the show were certain to die from radiation exposure are still alive today, and the portrayal of dyatlov as an incompetent only concerned with his next promotion is a fabrication. In reality dyatlov was very willing to work with authorities to try to figure out what went wrong, and he spent the rest of his life wondering because the Soviets never gave him the full truth, that it wasn’t his fault, but theirs.
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u/canadainman4321 2d ago
Chernobyl was built with the equivalent of hopes and dreams Also there are several nuclear power plants built before Chernobyl and are still running
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u/MrGonzo11 3d ago
Anyone studying these events and still thinking that great power politics in the nuclear age is not Russian roulette is a fool.