Cuban Missile Crisis: Intruder in Duluth
October 25, 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Intruder in Duluth
At around midnight on October 25, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at
it, and activated the “sabotage alarm.” This automatically set off sabotage alarms at all bases in the area. At Volk Field, Wisconsin,
the alarm was wrongly wired, and the Klaxon sounded which ordered nuclear armed F-106A interceptors to take off. The pilots knew there
would be no practice alert drills while DEFCON 3 was in force, and they believed World War III had started.
Immediate communication with Duluth showed there was an error. By this time aircraft were starting down the runway. A car raced
from command center and successfully signaled the aircraft to stop. The original intruder was a bear.
— Alan F. Philips, 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War.
Also see the Wikipedia for a man who should have statues in every major world city: Stanislav Petrov, the man who prevented World War III.
[ Replace this ad for $1/month ]
|
One Response to “Cuban Missile Crisis: Intruder in Duluth”
Leave a Reply, but read first
- Feel free to leave replies even to very old posts.
- Is your comment not specifically about this post? Great! Go here.
- Flame, swear, rant, shout — just don't spam! You won't increase your PageRank, even temporarily (the URLs are tagged 'nofollow'), and I'll delete it anyway. Save us both time.
Subscribe by email
August 17th, 2006 at 07h13
[...] he crippled the CIA’s efforts for years.This is a long read on the subject, but worth checking out.(Reply to this) Log in now.(Create account, or useOpenID) [...]