Margin of error

Shortly after 9am on January 25, 1994, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin was present in his office to attend a routine staff meeting, a sudden and unexpected situation emerged. American scientists based in Norway launched a weather rocket from Andoya Island off the coast of Norway to study the aurora borealis. But Russian radars interpreted it as a US Trident nuclear missile that was rapidly heading toward Moscow.

Notwithstanding the fact that Russian policymakers had at that time few reasons to expect a nuclear attack from the United States, President Yeltsin was handed a briefcase – Russian nuclear football – and he had only six minutes to decide the optimal retaliatory action. A full-scale nuclear war between the two countries was assumed to be only a few minutes away. According to the most authentic accounts, president Yeltsin had more than 4,700 nuclear warheads ready on that fateful day – to be dropped on American soil within the time span of less than an hour.

General Mikhail Kolesnikov, the chief of the general staff in Russia, was also directly monitoring the situation from his office. The final decision was about to be made when, quite fortunately, Russian radars started showing that trajectory of the missile is no longer taking it into Russian territory. A few minutes later, it also became clear that it was a ‘sounding rocket’ flying to collect data on atmospheric conditions. The ‘briefcase’ was closed and a nuclear war was averted.

Famous American analyst, Peter Pry, in his book ‘War Scare’, has described this incident as “the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile age.” In fact, president Yeltsin himself admitted that he had activated ‘nuclear football’ for the first time on that day. The weather-rocket scare was not a single incident rather it was one of hundreds of nuclear accidents since the advent of nuclear age when mechanical malfunction or miscommunication nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Last year, Eric Schlosser, a well-known American investigative journalist and author, published a book that examines the history of nuclear related risks, including many accidents and near-disasters. The book, ‘Command and Control’, explores the dilemma for countries possessing nuclear weapons that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy nuclear warheads without being destroyed by their unauthorised or accidental use? Schlosser reveals that most of the dangers faced by mankind from the existence of nuclear weapons emanate from the possibility of their inadvertent use.

In 1980, the US narrowly escaped a nuclear holocaust on its soil that would have killed hundreds of thousands of people. During a routine maintenance procedure at the site of a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile in Arkansas, a nine-pound tool accidentally fell in the missile silo, causing a leak of highly inflammable rocket fuel. On top of the Titan II missile was deployed a thermonuclear bomb, 600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

For the next few hours, hundreds of workers and security personnel put themselves in the face of grave risk to prevent the nuclear explosion that could cause incalculable damage. A recent study released by the Sandia National Laboratories has disclosed that more than 1,200 nuclear warheads were involved in various nuclear-related accidents from 1950 to 1968.

Since the early 1950s, the US has on more than one occasion come within a hair’s breadth of an accidental nuclear war or nuclear explosion on its soil due to a mechanical error. In 1958, a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 36 hydrogen bomb caught fire in Morocco, resulting in a massive fire that kept burning for many hours.

If the explosives in the warhead had detonated, the world would have seen the whole of Morocco turning into a nuclear wasteland. The incident was kept secret but only six weeks later a Mark 36 bomb accidentally dropped in South Carolina, resulting in a massive state of fear in the surrounding areas. The unimaginable destruction was fortunately averted because the explosive core had not been inserted in the bomb.

When the incident became publicly known, it was revealed through various media sources that only a year earlier another hydrogen bomb, without a core, had landed in Albuquerque. In 1960, the North American Air Defence Command (Norad) interpreted the rising of the moon over the Scandinavian region as a nuclear attack from Moscow. In the early 1980s, American national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was informed by Norad that 200 Soviet nuclear weapons would land on American soil within the next few months. But later it was identified that this false alarm was due to a defective chip in Norad’s computers.

Schlosser’s book, an excellent investigation of nuclear risks, has led many experts to point towards the alarming scenario that if nuclear related accidents have been occurring so frequently in a country like the US, the situation in other nuclear countries would surely be more grave. This view further adds to uncertainty in case of countries like Pakistan, India and Israel where paranoid nuclear establishments have always been reluctant to release information about any such kind of incidents. Today nine countries of the world, including North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and there is no guarantee against the use of these weapons after a false alarm or the possibility of warheads catching fire.

Nuclear security managers in Pakistan and India must be a little more open about their nuclear security arrangements and make efforts to minimise the possibility of any such kind of nuclear accidents. Even a small mechanical error can cause a nuclear holocaust in the whole region. We cannot afford to be naïve. The margin of error is zero.

Email: rizwanasghar5@unm.edu