by Phil Mason
The appearance of a new long-range nuclear bomber, the M-4 Bison, at the Soviet Union’s annual May Day parade in Red Square in 1954, was viewed at the time as not particularly significant as the craft looked like a prototype that would not be ready until at least 1960. Alarm bells were set ringing in Washington 14 months later when the American military attaché was invited to a celebration in July 1955 of Red Air Force Day. A display put on at Moscow’s Tushino airport astonished the diplomat as there seemed to be far more of the craft than America had thought.
He sent alarmed messages back to the Pentagon and the CIA, which led them to make an urgent revision of assumptions about Soviet strategy. Whereas the Americans were focusing on a missile strategy, the Soviets appeared to be focusing on the long-range bomber to deliver nuclear weapons. And America was woefully behind in that category of weapon.
The revised estimate was leaked to the press, leading to a Senate inquiry. The Eisenhower administration had to come up with another $928 million to buy far more B-52 bombers than expected.
In fact, the attaché at Tushino had been cleverly, but simply, duped. The flypast of the Bisons had been multiples of the same small number of craft, circling out of sight of the viewing stand and repeating their runs over and over again, to give the impression of a larger fleet than actually existed.
It cost the Americans a billion dollars, but in the end the ruse backfired on the Soviets as it left the United States far more powerful in the air than they ever intended to be. By the late 1950s, spy planes had revealed the silos that showed that in fact the real Soviet strength lay in intercontinental missiles.
An even more surreal dimension to the bomber threat emerged in 1994 when the deputy head of Russia’s strategic air force revealed that throughout the Cold War, for safety reasons, the Soviet air force planes never flew with genuine nuclear weapons but were loaded only with imitations.
Exploding the myth of the threat of air-dropped bombs, Anatoli Solovyov wrote in a Russian newspaper article that ground staff practised loading real weapons, but for flights always replaced them with dummies. It was ‘a reasonable decision not to expose ourselves and others to excessive risks.’
America and Britain both missed an opportunity to acquire the secrets of the Soviet nuclear missile programme early on in the Cold War. It would have been an intelligence coup that would have altered the course of the superpower struggle. But staff at both embassies in Moscow failed to follow up on the offer.
The story only emerged from the Russian security service archives in 2001. Alexander Orlov, a 27-year-old junior member of a secret research team, approached the American embassy shortly after the Soviet Union had successfully conducted its first nuclear explosion in August 1949. He was offering a copy of the entire Soviet missile programme for the next 15 years. America’s normal intelligence-gathering method relied on remote listening stations to monitor missile tests and deduce the state of progress from data on flight trials. They were now being offered the full technical blueprint, which included plans for intercontinental missiles and possibly satellite development and launches.
He tried to attract attention by lurking outside the embassy. He even threw a note through the half-open window of an embassy car offering to sell the material, but no one at the embassy ever responded. He then tried the British embassy, slipping inside the compound one night in September 1950. But there is no record of any meeting or incident report. Four days afterwards, he was picked up by the KGB. He was executed a year later, officially for treason and espionage on behalf of the British secret service.
At the time, the West knew next to nothing about Soviet intentions and capabilities, which adds to the mystery why the astonishing opportunity presented by Alexander Orlov went begging.
The West’s frontline defences in Europe against Soviet ground attack in the Cold War might have rested on chickens had a plan developed by British nuclear scientists been accepted.
The Blue Peacock tactical nuclear mine project was designed to stall an enemy surge across Germany. The seven-tonne bombs, carrying half the power of the weapon that destroyed Nagasaki, would be deployed at strategic points when an invasion was judged imminent. Production of the first 10 mines was ordered in July 1957. The problem was how to keep the inside of the bomb warm enough for it to work in winter. Planners proposed to fill the weapons with live chickens, with enough food and water for one week, the expected maximum lifetime of the weapon. Their body temperature would provide the required heat for the device to stay operational.
The scheme was never put into practice. The Ministry of Defence cancelled the project in February 1958.
On 20 February 1971, a technician at the United States’ emergency broadcasting system designed to issue national warnings of impending nuclear attack inadvertently sent out a test message under the password signifying it to be a genuine alert. Over 2,500 radio and television stations received the message. It told them to close down broadcasting and instruct listeners to await a broadcast by the president.
The mistake was not noticed for 26 minutes. Even then, the correction message was sent without the genuine password. It would be 40 minutes before a message with the correct password, signifying the alert to be a false alarm, was issued.
Fortunately, no action was taken by anyone on the receiving end of the message. In fact, it was ignored by a large number of stations and most of the American population. Press reports described a comedy of errors. Many stations did not look at their teletype printers until hours after the message was sent so carried on heedless of the apparent emergency. Others listened to their neighbouring stations to see who would sign off first. The correspondent of the London Times reported, ‘One or two went off the air but did not have the heart to tell their listeners that world war was about to break out.’
For some listeners, it was reminiscent of the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that had created nationwide panic amongst listeners. Not on this occasion. All of which made the day’s events an even more alarming outcome for the Pentagon’s civil defence planners. An official at the Civil Defence Office reflected that whether people would respond to such alerts was ‘one of the things I’ve always wondered.’ Now they knew.
Britain’s nuclear readiness has sometimes been little more reassuring. One episode uncovered by Whitehall-watcher Peter Hennessy in 1999 recalled a critical moment on 25 June 1963, when, had the Soviet Union wanted to launch an attack, British warning systems would never have known about it.
It came during the crucial last day of the Lord’s Test against the West Indies when the match was on a knife-edge in the final over. Colin Cowdrey, left arm encased in plaster from an earlier injury, had to return to the crease with two balls of the match left, England needing six to win, and their opponents one wicket for victory.
At that moment, every single screen of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning system was showing the live broadcast of the cricket from the BBC.
Another alarming incident took place in November 1979 when President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received a middle-of-the-night phone call from his deputy, Colonel William Odom, reporting that the country’s early warning systems were indicating that the Soviet Union had just launched 220 intercontinental missiles at the United States.
Shortly after, Odom rang again to confirm the bad news and to add that the correct figure was 2,200 missiles – the dreaded all-out nuclear attack. Just before he was about to call Carter, who would have had between three and seven minutes to make a decision, Odom telephoned a third time to tell him it was all a mistake. A technician had loaded an exercise tape used for simulating war games into the computer system.
The closest the world has come to accidental war seems to have been in 1983 as the stability of the Soviet Union was starting to unravel. In a period which saw a change of leadership three times in 30 months after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the last Communist strongman, the Soviet leadership was intensely fearful of the apparent
solidity of the Western bloc, now concertedly led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
As the new Soviet head, Yuri Andropov, struggled to assume leadership, Reagan had made his ‘evil empire’ speech and then, in March 1983, announced his ‘Star Wars’ strategic defence initiative aiming to equip America with the power to shoot down incoming missiles while still in space. When Soviet jets shot down a Korean airliner which had strayed into Siberian airspace in September, the tensions only heightened.
The Soviets were also aware of a major NATO military exercise planned for early November to test command coordination procedures for activating nuclear war. In the febrile atmosphere, there was a growing fear of this exercise being a mask for an actual attack. A sudden flurry of communications traffic between Britain and America in late October seriously raised suspicions in Moscow’s mind.
In fact, the flood of messages represented anything but increased collaboration. The exchanges were in response to Britain’s outrage at the US invasion of the Caribbean (and Commonwealth) island of Grenada on 25 October of which the British government had not been informed in advance. The Soviet analysts, able only to detect the scale but not the content of the traffic, had no reason to suspect the sudden change was due to the two powers arguing furiously with each other. It seemed instead to be confirming greater consultation between their biggest enemies.
As the exercise got under way, on the night of 8/9 November, the KGB despatched only the second ‘flash’ signal ever sent throughout the Cold War (the other was during the Cuban Missile Crisis) to all Soviet stations in Europe warning that American bases had been put on alert. It was incorrect, but for two days until the NATO exercise ended as planned on 11 November, the Soviet Union was poised to unleash its arsenal at any sign of further threat.
Unknowingly, the world teetered on the brink for 48 hours.
We must all hope that BBC Radio’s flagship morning news programme Today does not suffer a long-running strike. It was revealed in 2002 that part of Britain’s nuclear strike orders for the Royal Navy’s Trident submarine force includes authorising the captain to begin nuclear action if the submarine is unable to pick up the programme for a secret number of consecutive days. Security officials were reported to believe that failure to detect the programme would be a reliable sign that Britain had suffered a catastrophic nuclear attack.
In March 2001, a former CIA operative disclosed that an Agency deception campaign in the 1960s that backfired, had probably been responsible for the modern development of chemical and biological weapons.
Raymond Garthoff revealed that the FBI and the US Army began a campaign in the mid-1960s to convince the Soviet Union that the US had developed chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon had actually determined that the whole concept was a blind alley and that feasible armaments were not possible. The plan, then, was to trick the Communists into wasting billions of scarce roubles finding out the same (much like the Soviet ‘bomber gap’ ruse had done to the Americans, although they did not know it at the time).
The plot backfired when the Soviets succeeded where the US had not, and within a few years lethal drug-resistant strains of smallpox and anthrax and new nerve gases were in the Soviet armoury.
The irony deepened when, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trained experts and stocks of weapons-grade germs became highly vulnerable to offers from outside the country. Proliferation to rogue states, the nightmare of the first decade of the 21st century, thus conceivably traces itself directly back to America’s clever idea half a century ago.
Live anthrax weapons lay undisturbed in a Norwegian museum for 60 years before they were tested and neutralised. They were part of one of the world’s earliest, and more bizarre, biological warfare attacks dating from the First World War.
A Swedish mercenary, Baron Otto von Rosen, was sent by the German secret service in the winter of 1917 to sabotage British Arctic supply lines to Russia. He was armed with 19 disease-laden sugar cubes which he was to feed to horses and reindeer being used to pull supply sledges from ports in northern Norway across the top of Scandinavia into Russia.
He was captured, and two of the cubes were put on display in the police museum in Trondheim. They lay there until 1997 when a concerned official sent them to a British biological warfare laboratory for testing. The spores were found still to be very much alive.
A week-long war was fought between neighbouring El Salvador and Honduras in July 1969 after one had beaten the other at football.
The so-called ‘Soccer War’ was sparked when El Salvador had beaten Honduras 3 – 0 in a World Cup qualifying match in San Salvador. The match, a return leg after Honduras had won the first game 1 – 0, was played in an atmosphere of intense rivalry. During the anthem-playing ceremony at the start of the game, instead of the Honduran flag – which had already been burned in front of the spectators – the hosts ran up the flagpole a dirty, tattered dish rag.
After the victory, riots broke out back in Honduras against the 300,000 Salvadoreans who had migrated there for work. A large number were forced to flee home. As tension continued to increase, El Salvador invaded Honduras and 6,000 people were killed or wounded in the conflict before a ceasefire was brokered.
It was not the first time that two Latin American countries had descended into war from trivial beginnings. In 1932, a postage stamp printed by Paraguay prompted neighbouring Bolivia to invade. The stamp portrayed a map of the region with the large disputed border area of Chaco marked as belonging to Paraguay. To add insult, a slogan was added asserting ‘Has been, is and will be.’
Bolivia attacked, won initial success and then collapsed. In the ensuing three-year war, Paraguay won most of the territory by the time hostilities ceased. In the peace treaty which followed in 1938, Paraguay gained three-quarters of the disputed area. A hundred thousand people died in the conflict.
5
Science – Inspiration, Invention and Intrigue
William Herschel, who in 1781 became the first person in history to discover a planet of the solar system, might have had it named after him had it not been for the overenthusiasm of King George III and Herschel’s enforced riposte.
The King awarded the German-born émigré a pension on news of the discovery. Herschel felt obliged to reciprocate and declared the name of the new planet to be Georgium Sidus in the royal honour. This naturally irked non-British astronomers, even leading a few to start calling the planet ‘Herschel’ instead. For 40 years, it wavered between the two.
In the end, the cheek of trying to label a planet after a British Royal proved too much for continental astronomers and some years after Herschel’s death in 1822 the alternative idea of Johann Bode, who had confirmed the discovery in 1781, prevailed. He had proposed Uranus, from the mythological thread connecting the previously outermost planet, Saturn (father of Jupiter). So the next planet out should be Uranus, father of Saturn.
Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 revolutionised the cotton-growing industry by cracking the biggest obstacle to mass production – how to separate the cotton fibre from the seeds. Hand processing made cotton extremely expensive and difficult to produce, but the dexterity required to separate the materials looked impossible to recreate mechanically.
It was solved in a flash of observation. Whitney was inspired by watching a cat clawing a dead chicken and getting only the feathers. Cheap to make, the cotton gin – a revolving cylinder of nails that was turned to draw the cotton through small slotted holes – enabled a single operator to make 50 pounds of cotton a day instead of one.
Pioneer tunnel engineer, Marc Isambard Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, invented the first mechanical borer for tunnelling under river beds in 1818 after watching how the shipworm, a notorious wood-boring mollusc, was able to eat its way through ships’ hulls while protecting its head from the pressure of the material collapsing around it.
He designed an ingenious iron-framed device which protected work
ers from cave-ins as they cut through unstable sea beds, and used it to build the first underwater tunnel in the world, the Thames Tunnel, between Rotherhithe and Wapping which took 18 years to complete between 1825 and 1843. It is still used to this day.
The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by French doctor René Laennec because his patient was young, female and on the plump side.
Laennec suspected the woman to be suffering from a heart problem. He felt awkward adopting the usual method of examination – holding his ear close to the woman’s naked chest. Her ‘great degree’ of fatness also hampered the alternative of holding his hand to her chest. He improvised by using a rolled up newspaper, and was astonished at the amplification effect it produced.
He later developed a 12-inch-long wooden tube, and had invented the stethoscope.
Walter Hunt, a New York mechanic, invented the safety pin in 1849 in just three hours, to pay off a $15 debt. He saw no commercial value in the idea, agreed to sell all his rights to it for $400 to the friend he was in debt to, and felt pleased to have made a $385 profit on the deal.
The friend, and future manufacturers, subsequently reaped millions from the device.
The development of the railways in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s might not have progressed as rapidly as it did if George Stephenson had not deliberately lied to parliament.
After the inauguration of Stephenson’s first railway, the Stockton – Darlington line in 1825, a rush of other proposals were put forward for other routes. A parliamentary committee scrutinised Stephenson closely on this newfangled form of transport. The chief concern was speed, and the fear that too rapid speeds would cause physical or mental injury to passengers.