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The Hydrogen Bomb Homepage

Featuring Pics.; Cuba, where the H-bomb was so nearly first used in anger; and some facts from Bikini Attol, the main test site.

Must I be stronger; or can we be friends?

Of course any reasonable person would want to be friends, wouldn't they? Especially with so much at stake... but we're not talking about reasonable people here, these are sick people whose life is rooted in paranoia and mistrust.

The arms race was (and is) driven by the U.S.military-industrial complex, without the consent of the U.S. people.

Arms are consumer durables and the second hand market in arms is terrorising ordinary people right across the so called 'developing world'. Again, in the South, its the corrupt politicians that buy those arms not the people.

The Cuban missile crisis

When I was six months old, so mum tells me, all the tinned food, including petfood, disappeared from the grocery shops. I wanted to find out why.
It was nearly LeMay and Power's finest hour.

Let's start us a war!

The C.I.A.'s stage-managed a 'counter-revolution' at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 which was an embarrassing failure. Kennedy refused permission for U.S. planes to provide air cover, a decision extremely unpopular with the military 'hawks'. By 1962 Cuba was by far the biggest thorn in the Agency's side. Castro and Cuba proved that there was another way that worked, and it wasn't the American way.

The Pentagon had deployed fifteen Jupiter Intermediate Range Nuclear Missiles in Turkey on the Southern border of the U.S.S.R.. An equivalent force was ready to be sent from Russia to Cuba to maintain the balance.

General Thomas Power headed Strategic Air Command and Curtis LeMay was U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff. Both were extremely worried that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was catching up with the U.S. and might soon overtake it. They both favoured war rather than to risk the 'balance of power' equalising or even swinging against them in the future. Cuba was the excuse they had been waiting for.

Curtis LeMay was clear about what to do. 'The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters. Now we've got him in a trap, let's take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thoughts, let's take off his testicles too." He was angry about not being allowed to invade Cuba, saying just after the crisis that, "...at any point the Soviet Union could have been obliterated without more than expectable losses on our side."

General Power was at least as eager to get World War III started as LeMay. As a military colleague put it, "General Power was demanding: he was mean; he was cruel, unforgiving, and he didn't have the time of day to pass with anyone. A hard, cruel individual... I would like to say this. 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 circumstances, launch the force."

So while the Pentagon plays games... the world holds its breath

Sunday 14th October 1962. Pentagon satellites send back the first pictures of ground preparations in Cuba for what seem to be nuclear missile sites.

Monday night, October 22nd 1962. Kennedy speaks on American TV to the Russians and to the world of the threat posed by the Cuban missiles. He explains why they must never arrive... or else. While he speaks the Pentagon slides up from Defence Condition (or Defcon) 5 to Defcon 3, two steps down from all-out war.
54 Strategic Air Command bombers take off, each carrying 4 H-bombs, to boost the 12 plane peacetime 24 hour patrol.
136 Atlas and Titan Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles are prepared for firing.

36 test missiles at various bases are taken over by S.A.C.. A.F.S.C. and civilian personnel are replaced by S.A.C. command and control crews.

Wednesday October 24th 1962. Defcon 2 is declared, now only one stage from all-out war.

Thursday night, October 25th 1962. Air Defence Command F-106's armed with Falcon (GAR 11) nuclear air to air missiles get the order to scramble at Volk Field, Wisconsin. Practice alert drills were cancelled at Defcon 3 so the interceptor crews assume they are going to war. Since they have not been briefed that SAC bombers are aloft dispersing and do not know the SAC airborne alert routes nuclear friendly fire is a real possibility. But the launch klaxon at Volk field is an error. An airforce guard at Duluth Section Direction Centre had detected an intruder inside the base perimeter and sounded a sabotage alarm which had somehow keyed the scramble klaxon at Volks Field. As soon as Duluth realise it's a mistake Volk Field is told. Volk's commanding officer leaps into his car, drives out onto the Tarmac and flashes his headlights at the squadron of F-106's about to take off. The intruder turns out to be a bear.

Friday morning 4am, 26th October 1962. An Atlas ICBM is launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base across the Pacific in the direction of the Soviet Union towards the Kwajalein test range. A politically unsanctioned and potentially catastrophic action. S.A.C. have taken over the test missiles at Vandenburg at the time of Defcon 3, programmed them with Soviet targets, and are well into the process of attaching nuclear warheads. The Atlas was singled out and was the only missile at Vandenburg not to have a nuclear warhead being prepared or already installed. It is launched on its pre-crisis schedule with S.A.C. concurrence, a deliberate provocation.

Friday afternoon, 26th October 1962. Titan II test launch from Moorestown. All missile test launches immediately cancelled at the highest political level. Col. William Watts flies down to Patrick AFB to explain how this firing had been allowed.

Sunday morning 8.58am, 28th October 1962. U.S. radar NORAD picks up a missile launch from Cuba with a near Tampa, Florida trajectory. NORAD commander is rung at home and S.A.C. command in Omaha warned. Only after predicted impact at 9.02 didn't happen the missile is determined to be a simulation caused by a misplaced computer test tape.

S.A.C. airborne alert bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points. The bombers only turned around when the Soviet freighters carrying the missiles to Cuba stopped dead in the Atlantic.

A U-2 high altitude spy-plane strayed over Siberia. LeMay had neglected Presidential orders to cancel all overflights. Kruschev said, "...an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber which might push us to a fateful step." Russian air defence interceptors flew fully armed with nuclear rockets with all safety devices removed.

The U.S. Navy tracked soviet nuclear subs. aggressively throughout the world - forcing them to surface and reveal their positions. A serious provocation when it had orders to do so only if the subs. entered U.S. quarantine areas.

S.A.C. Minuteman crews not trained in Titan and Atlas safety procedures took command of test missiles at Malmstrom AFB. One of the S.A.C. crew assigned to a control centre which wasn't quite finished confesses, "We didn't literally hot-wire the launch command system - that would be the wrong analogy - but we did have a second key... I could have launched it on my own if I'd wanted to."

Aftermath

The blockade of Cuba worked, the crisis passed and LeMay bitterly criticised Kennedy for not allowing an invasion of Cuba. As Macnamara put it, '...after Krushcev had agreed to remove the missiles President Kennedy invited the chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, "We lost! We aught to just go in there today and knock 'em off!"

At a conference in 1989 in Moscow to discuss the crisis it was revealed C.I.A. 'intelligence' of only conventional capability in Cuba could not have been more wrong. The Cubans had 20 nuclear warheads for their R-12 ballistic missiles which could have reached Washington quite easily. There were also 9 tactical nuclear missiles that Soviet commanders in Cuba were delegated power to use. Neither class of weapon needed orders from Moscow to be fired. Any attempt to invade Cuba as was being pressed for by LeMay and Power would have been disastrous.

Kruschev said in retirement that he had wanted to protect Cuba from invasion and equalise, '...what the west calls the balance of power. We had no desire to start a war. On the contrary our principle aim was to deter America from starting a war. We were well aware that a war which started over Cuba would quickly expand into a world war.'

The Soviet Union never went to full nuclear alert all the years of the Cold War. After Cuba the U.S. never did again, so far. Neither did the two nations ever directly confront each other again.

According to the World Health Organisation a nuclear exchange at the time would have meant roughly 300 million people killed plus 300 million seriously injured.

H-bomb tests

hydrogen bomb exploded on 26th March 1964

On the 26th of March 1964 this H-bomb test, Castle Romeo, was one of the biggest ever.

The first H-bomb ever 'Mike' was exploded at 7.15 am local time on November 1st 1952. The mushroom cloud was 8 miles across and 27 miles high. The canopy was 100 miles wide. Radioactive mud fell out of the sky followed by heavy rain. 80 million tons of earth was vaporised. Mike was the first ever megaton yeild explosion.

Castle Bravo was a lithium-deuteride fuelled H-bomb exploded 1st March 1954 at Bikini Atoll. It yielded 15 megatons and had a fireball 4 miles in diameter. It was much bigger than the test crews had been expecting. It engulfed its 7,500 foot diagnostic pipe array all the way out to the earth-banked instrument bunker, which barely survived. Test crews were trapped in experiment bunkers well outside the expected limits of its effects. It menaced task force ships, one of which held Marshall Rosenbluth, a U.S. theoretical physicist, "I was on a ship that was thirty miles away, and we had this horrible white stuff raining down on us. I got 10 rads [100 chest x-rays] of radiation from it. It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until the edge of it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience." Bravo vaporised a crater 250' deep and 6,500' in diameter out of the atoll rock. The 'horrible white stuff' was calcium precipitated from vaporised coral.

The Soviets put together H-bombs with a yeild of 100 megatons but the design was never tested at full strength.

H-bomb Fireball 'It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky'

The Hydrogen Bomb Homepage

Featuring Pics.; Cuba, where the H-bomb was so nearly first used in anger; and some facts from Bikini Attol, the main test site.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuba - blow by blow account

The H-Bomb tests fiasco

Explosive Links