That was _not_ a good movie about nuclear deterrence and nuclear war (and I have seen them all).
Editor/Co-author, “Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940” • Nonresident Senior Fellow, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists • Nuclear weapons expert (history, policy, costs, accidents) and tracker of the nuclear “Football.”
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That was _not_ a good movie about nuclear deterrence and nuclear war (and I have seen them all).
No connection at all (that I know of). Jacobsen's book is actually deeply flawed in a number of critical ways that actually undermine the story she tells. From everything I have heard and read so far, the filmmakers on "House of Dynamite" got the facts right.
I’m all in: “... an unrelenting chokehold thriller so controlled, kinetic and unsettlingly immersive that you stagger out at the end of it wondering if the world will still be intact. ... Ending on the perfect sobering note—and image—it’s a crackling thriller and a wake-up call from complacency.”
Will “House of Dynamite” wake up the global public? “How can we call this ’defense’ when the inevitable outcome is total destruction? I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox—to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.”
I wonder if larger ICE units use drone jammers (such as those deployed by the Secret Service during designated National Special Security Events like the State of the Union address or the Super Bowl, or to routinely protect the president) to thwart something like that?
Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds.
It is definitely near the top of the list, although this was not publicly known at the time or for many years thereafter.
Attachment B in this link is the June 1993 final fact-finding investigation by the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization: aviation-is.better-than.tv/KAL007%20ICA...
Osipovich added, “I did not tell the ground that it was a Boeing-type plane; they did not ask me.” KAL 007 began to ascend to conserve fuel, slowing gradually. The Soviets saw this as an evasive maneuver and ordered it destroyed before the faster interceptors overshot it and it left Soviet airspace.
In a 1991 interview, Osipovich said he told ground controllers he saw the aircraft’s “blinking lights.” “I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use.”
Fall 1983 was not peaceful: Oct. 23—Beirut Marine Barracks bombing kills 241 US servicemen Oct. 26—US invades Grenada Nov. 7—NATO ABLE ARCHER nuclear war exercise Nov. 13—first US nuclear GLCMs deployed in UK Nov. 20—“The Day After airs on ABC Nov. 23—first Pershing II IRBMs deployed in W. Germany
The attack only intensified the already acrimonious relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Following orders to destroy the plane before it left Soviet airspace a second time, Maj. Gennadiy Osipovich fired two air-to-air missiles. Shrapnel from one missile punctured the cabin and severely damaged the 747’s flight control systems, causing it to spiral into the ocean about 12 minutes later.
Today in 1983, a Soviet Su-15 interceptor shot down a Boeing 747 operating as Korean Air Lines Flight 007 en route from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, killing 269 passengers and crew, after it accidentally strayed into restricted airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island.
(On June 5, 1963—as part of a whirlwind five day trip to western states, and after delivering the commencement address at the US Air Force Academy and touring its campus—President John F. Kennedy paid a brief visit to NORAD headquarters, then aboveground at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.)
During his tour, NORAD Commander in Chief General Seth McKee presented President Nixon with a piece of granite from Cheyenne Mountain in a wooden presentation box while standing outside the facility’s underground entrance.
Watergate co-conspirators Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and White House Counsel John Erlichman were there for the almost two hour visit (as seen in photo), which preceded a reception and meeting at the National Governors Association in Colorado Springs.
Today in 1969, President Richard Nixon became the first and only sitting president to visit the underground headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) inside Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado, just three years after it became fully operational. Future convicted …
These are great finds, even without sound! Thanks.
Or, if you’d like a lighter movie with an uplifting take on how the federal government could really work for the people …
“His problem _is_ more” works much better.
Le chien réticent. Vous êtes en Paris maintenant.
“’In a recent essay, Dr. Josephson … cast Mr. Trump’s acts as brazenly totalitarian. … ’Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had,’ Dr. Josephson wrote [in a recent essay]. ’He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.’” See also this distortion of reality:
“’Despots want science that has practical results,’ said Paul R. Josephson, an emeritus professor of history at Colby College and author of a book on totalitarian science. ’They’re afraid that basic knowledge will expose their false claims.’” (Gift link)
“This paper [looks] at the design, engineering, fielding, and execution of the world’s first megaton-class physics experiment .... Although others have written on aspects of this technical history, they have not benefited from access to the original classified documents used by the present author.”
A detailed new article in Fusion Science and Technology by Los Alamos weapons scientist Jonathan E. Morgan examines the design, construction, and testing of the 1952 10.4-Mt MIKE thermonuclear device tinyurl.com/y3jd5an4. Attn: @wellerstein.bsky.social, @casillic.bsky.social, @saftergood.bsky.social
The missile was returned to operational service 31 days later. By then, the Air Force had finally erected protective lightning strike diversion tower arrays at all 30 Jupiter launch sites in Italy and all 15 launch sites in Turkey—finishing just days before the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Today in 1962—for the second time in two months and the fourth and final time since October 1961—a US Air Force Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile at Gioia del Colle Air Base in southeastern Italy was struck by lightning, partially activating its 1.4-Megaton W49 thermonuclear warhead.
The two-stage SMOKY device evolved into the three-stage B41 bomb, the highest-yield thermonuclear weapon ever deployed by the United States (25 Megatons). The B41 weighed 10,500 pounds and had the highest yield-to-weight ratio of any US nuclear weapon. Five hundred were operational from 1960-76.
This is a slow-motion view of the early stages of the SMOKY fireball and mushroom cloud: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIji... The spikes emanating from the fireball are the guy wires securing the tower and the top part of the tower vaporizing and turning into superheated plasma—the “rope trick” effect.
Here are three photographs of some of the troops who observed the SMOKY test. Intensive follow-up health assessments in 1979, 1980, and 1983. of the 3,224 military participants found a 150 percent increase in expected leukemia (10 excess cases) relative to a similar population of unexposed people.
Clockwise from top left: an early stage of the SMOKY fireball; the cloud’s estimated trajectory at several altitudes across the United States and Canada over the next several days; post-detonation iodine-131 deposition from the fallout; and estimated per capita thyroid doses from SMOKY by US county.
Today in 1957 at the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducted Plumbbob SMOKY, a 44-kiloton thermonuclear test detonated atop a 700-foot steel tower. SMOKY created huge amounts of radioactive fallout, exposing 3,224 troops performing post-shot maneuvers near ground zero to high radiation levels.
I’ll drink to that!
A huge loss for our collective political memory. And perhaps the person most responsible for leading me to decide to track the whereabouts of the “Football” (because he periodically used his White House access to do so on Twitter back in the day).
Since January 20, Trump has been chief pardon officer, real estate developer, menace to society, golf “champion,” luxury airplane broker, tasteless interior decorator, theatrical producer, international joke, and now, junior detective. What hasn’t he been? President of the United States of America.
Wait, what happened?
And see also: www.electrospaces.net/2012/10/the-...
For more on the history of—and evolving technology behind—the Washington-Moscow Direct Communication Link, see this fact sheet from the online Crypto Museum: www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/hotli...
In 2020 and 2021, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commemorated the anniversary with a tweet (although its graphic misstated the year the “hotline” was converted into an email platform). However, it was noticeably silent on the subject in 2022, 2023, 2024, and again this year.
In 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears,” Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) used the “hotline” (depicted, prematurely, as a chat-based computer platform) to convince Russia’s president (Ciarán Hinds) that a neo-Nazi billionaire is secretly manipulating him and the US president into fighting a nuclear war.
Also in 1964, “Fail Safe” showed the president (Henry Fonda), accompanied by his translator Buck (Larry Hagman), talking to his Soviet counterpart on the “hotline” from a bunker deep beneath the White House in order to prevent an accidental nuclear attack from escalating to an all-out nuclear war.
(The flip side of the 45 rpm record used to distribute that announcement was the very 1960s novelty song “Love That Bomb,” recorded especially to promote the dark comedy movie):
And here is that pre-recorded announcement:
Columbia Pictures even promoted “Dr. Strangelove” as the “hot-line suspense comedy,” and encouraged movie theater owners to set up red “hotline” telephones in their lobbies, which would play a pre-recorded announcement about the upcoming movie when patrons picked up the receiver.
Over the years, the “hotline” has played a critical (if not always accurate) role in several nuclear-war-themed films, including 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove”: “Hello? Eh, hello? Hello, Dmitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?”
On October 31, 2016, President Barack Obama used the Direct Communication Link to warn President Vladimir Putin to stop interfering in the US presidential election: “International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace. We will hold Russia to those standards.”
The United States’ first official use of the “hotline” was on November 22, 1963, after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. The Soviet Union’s first official message was sent on June 5, 1967, following the start of the Six-Day War between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria.
As communication technologies evolved, so did the “hotline.” In 1985, facsimile machines were added, enabling transmission of handwritten messages, maps, charts, and photographs. Then, in 2008, the link was completely upgraded to a secure computer network with email and chat capabilities.
Here are what some of the original East German teletypes at the Moscow end of the “hotline” looked like (exterior and interior):
Today in 1963, the Washington-Moscow “hotline” became operational. Although commonly pictured as a red telephone, the Direct Communications Link was originally an encrypted set of teletypes in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and at Communist Party headquarters in Moscow.
18 years ago this morning, a B-52H bomber (call sign Doom 99) took off for what was supposed to be a routine flight from Minot AFB, North Dakota, to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. But no one aboard the B-52, at either base, in the Air Force, or the DoD realized it was carrying six live nuclear weapons.
That’s John Schubeck, KABC channel 7 in Los Angeles. Died at 61 in 1997 of kidney and liver failure brought on by alcoholism.
Also 1974 ...
Maasdam is not the first former “Football” carrier to run for Congress. Robert “Buzz” Patterson (USAF, ret.), who famously accused President Clinton of losing his nuclear code “Biscuit” in January 1998, ran as a Republican in California's 7th congressional district in 2020 and lost.
Maasdam carried the Presidential Emergency Satchel for President Barack Obama from January 2010 to October 2012. Here’s an article about Maasdam from this past May.
Former Navy SEAL and “Football” aide Matt Maasdam is running for Congress in Michigan’s 7th congressional district (centered around Lansing) against first-term Republican Tom Barrett, an Army veteran and former member of the Michigan legislature, who won in 2024 with just 50.3% of the vote.
No, it's not as bad as those catastrophic accidents. But it could have been, especially if the aircraft had caught fire or crashed and no one in the air or on the ground was aware it was carrying six thermonuclear weapons.
As a result of this BENT SPEAR incident, the secretary of the Air Force and US Air Force chief of staff resigned, 7 senior USAF officers were relieved of their commands or positions and reassigned, and 65 airmen lost their Personnel Reliability Program certifications to work with nuclear weapons.
Approximately 36 hours had elapsed from the time the armed missiles were mistakenly removed from their bunker at Minot to the time an airman noticed them aboard the B-52 in Barksdale. In all that time, not a single person realized they were missing or that they had been left unguarded at both bases.
The B-52 departed Minot at 8:40 AM on August 30 and landed at Barksdale at 11:23 AM (both local times). The crew signed out and went to lunch. Again, there were no special sentries. It wasn’t until 8:30 PM, when munitions crews began unloading the aircraft, that one person noticed something amiss.
This was supposed to be a routine fight supporting the Air Force’s March 2007 decision to retire the ACM by ferrying the missiles stored at Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, for disposal (by August 2007, more than 200 unarmed ACMs had been safely transported to Barksdale). It wasn’t.
Before takeoff early the next morning, the B-52’s radar navigator closely inspected only the 6 missiles on the right-wing pylon, all of which properly carried dummy warheads. The pilot signed the manifest listing 12 unarmed ACMs as cargo without conducting a required final verification inspection.
Today in 2007 at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, munitions crews mistakenly loaded a B-52H bomber with 6 nuclear-armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, each carrying a live W80-1 warhead with a variable yield of 5 to 150 kilotons. The plane sat on the ramp overnight without any special security guards.
Note that this is the date for Judgment Day given in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Because of the events in that film, specifically the death of scientist Dr. Miles Dyson and the destruction of Cyberdyne Systems, in “Terminator 3: Rise of Machines,” Judgment Day shifts to July 25, 2004, at 6:18 PM.
Today in 1997 at 2:14 AM EDT, the Skynet artificial intelligence system became self aware and—after we panicked and tried to shut it off—launched our nuclear weapons at their preset targets in Russia, which in turn retaliated against us, attacks that killed 3,000,000,000 people. Happy Judgment Day!
Today is also the 34th anniversary of the closure of the Semipalatinsk Test Site—aka the Polygon—and the 16th International Day Against Nuclear Tests, established by the United Nations in 2009 at the urging of Kazakhstan and other states to commemorate that milestone.
President Truman was initially not certain he wanted to publicly announce the Soviet nuclear test, worrying that doing so would have serious diplomatic and economic repercussions. When he finally did, however, he did not say it was an atomic bomb test, only that “an atomic explosion occurred.”
[Source: “Finding the Site of the First Soviet Nuclear Test in 1949,” by former U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist Lester Machta in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (1992)]. journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal...
Radioactive debris from this test was detected in early September by US Air Force WB-29 reconnaissance aircraft and a US Navy program to collect and analyze fallout in rainwater. Once traced back to its source—see next link for how that happened—President Truman announced the test on September 23.
And here is a 32-minute formerly secret official documentary (with English subtitles) prepared for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin about the extensive preparations for and execution of that first atomic weapon test, along with a detailed report about the results.
Here is a restored official (silent) footage from @atomcentral.bsky.social of that momentous nuclear test:
Although the Soviet Union had crucial information from spies inside the Manhattan Project and the Smyth Report about the device’s design and the industrial processes the United States used to make its components, it still took more than 48 months to build and test it—versus 35 months for the US.
Today in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. The 22-kiloton RDS-1 device—codenamed Joe-1 by the United States—was essentially a copy of the first plutonium-fueled implosion-type atomic bomb (the “Gadget”) the United States tested on July 16, 1945.
Attention journalists! If you report on national security, space, AI, climate change, the environment, and/or local economic and health issues, attend this year's free Nuclear Reporting Summit on October 9-10 near Little Rock, Arkansas, to discuss how these are all connected. Details in the link.
The Washington Post says it was the Maryland National Guard. "At President Bush's request, about 5,000 National Guard soldiers are being deployed to 442 commercial airports nationwide after receiving special security training from the Federal Aviation Administration."
I remember seeing multiple soldiers (not sure if they were with the National Guard) armed with some serious rifles deployed inside the terminals at BWI when I flew in and out of there in mid-October 2001. It was a startling sight.
On March 19, 1959, the New York Times published multiple front-page articles revealing the secrets of Operation ARGUS almost seven months earlier—with the tacit approval of senior officials in the Eisenhower administration (which was preparing to declassify the purpose and results of the tests).
Don't have time to read Wolverton’s entire book? Then this excerpt adapted from his book—about how the top secret experiment was finally revealed on March 19, 1959, by the New York Times (with the quiet assent of the Eisenhower administration)—is for you (free link): archive.is/lVf21
For more on Operation ARGUS, which was spurred by fears raised by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik—the world’s first artificial satellite—the previous October, see Mark Wolverton’s 2018 book, “Burning the Sky: Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space.”
Remarkably, Operation ARGUS was conceived and executed in only five months in order to complete it before a multilateral moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing began on October 31, 1958 (a good-faith gesture accompanied by the start of US-UK-Soviet negotiations on a nuclear test ban).
Here is a short clip of declassified footage of Operation ARGUS taken aboard the guided-missile ship USS Norton Sound (AVM-1), one of nine ships carrying a total of about 4,500 personnel involved in Task Force 88:
Thirteen months earlier, a W25 warhead was tested in a more dramatic—and well-publicized—fashion at the Nevada Proving Ground:
Coordinated by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, modified Lockheed X-17A rockets launched from the USS Norton Sound (AVM-1) about 1,100 miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa, carried 1.7-kiloton W25 warheads high into the upper atmosphere (about 300 miles).
Operation ARGUS sought to determine if artificial radiation belts created a military advantage by degrading radio and radar transmissions, damaging satellites, and damaging or destroying ICBM arming and fuzing mechanisms. Shots ARGUS II and ARGUS III took place on Aug. 30 and Sept. 6, respectively.
Today in 1958, over the South Atlantic Ocean, US Navy Task Force 88, under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, secretly conducted the first of three high-altitude nuclear weapon tests codenamed Operation ARGUS. These were the only clandestine US atmospheric nuclear weapon tests.
Here's Trump back on July 8 spending almost 10 minutes telling his Cabinet about each of the paintings of presidents he added to the Cabinet room, and asking for a vote on whether he should apply gold leaf to the ceiling molding “because you can’t paint it. If you paint it, it won’t look good.”
Trump’s tacky “gold” appliqués have now spread to the Cabinet Room walls. And in his spare time as decorator-in-chief, he also ordered the crown molding on the ceiling covered in gold leaf (he regularly boasts that it is definitely not paint).
Kowtow Kristi, now with xenophobic predispositions * * Hair extensions, makeup, teeth, and sense of legality sold separately (and subject to costly Trump tariffs).
Repurposing a “No Smoking” sign for this purpose is a nice touch.
In a normal administration, a Cabinet meeting would be conducted behind closed doors (after a brief photo-op at the beginning) and used to discuss implementation of the president’s policies and programs, not to orally fellate a malignantly narcissistic wannabe dictator for three hours on live TV.
Perhaps they are incredible prodigies. Or were once child laborers.
Either I am suddenly popular with four identical twins or else …
While I lived across the street from a shelter for homeless families for three years and once was delayed from walking home by a police drug raid, I was never the victim of any violent crime. My sole crime story? My wallet was stolen from my Greenpeace office by a guy pretending to be a messenger.
This is rich coming from a soulless goon with a 24/7 taxpayer-funded security detail. Also, I lived and worked in Washington, DC, from 1988-98, during the crack epidemic. It was far less safe then, but even so I walked and used the Metro day and night and never once changed my behavior out of fear.
No worries! It's a little complicated.
