January 25, 1995: The Norwegian Rocket Incident

Moose:

It's no doubt that we live in a dangerous world.

However there have been many incidents that are analogous to that one. A single missile, even a MIRV, is not at all likely to be interpreted as a nuclear attack, since it is assumed by all who are responsible for launching a retaliatory attack, that such an event would involve massive numbers of missiles in order to take out the ability to retaliate, or it would be a nonsensical exercise since retaliation would certainly be expected.

I do recall there were several potentially more serious events on our side where it was thought that a massive attack was underway. I believe one was the result of a bungled training exercise. I also seem to remember another one that was due to (I'm foggy on this) either an unexpected satellite re-entry and breakup or a meteor shower.

In any case God only knows how many times and how close we may have come to a bad end, because these things are not exactly trumpeted on the front pages, and very rarely come to light at all, (even rarer in Russia).

Regards,

Greg

Thanks for the feedback, Greg. In their article in IEEE Spectrum, Geoffrey Forden, Pavel Podvig and Theodore A. Postol consider why a single MIRV might generate a full nuclear alert. They theorize that because the trajectory of the Norwegian rocket intersected the flight path of a multiple-ICBM strike, Russian officials could conclude that "the rocket might have been a multiple-warhead Trident intended to create a pattern of nuclear explosions at high altitudes that would have blinded the radar" network along the Barents Sea. Later in the article, the authors seem to contradict themselves by stating that "Russian leaders almost certainly knew there was no massive launch of U.S. ICBMs because their early-warning satellites were observing those missile fields and could see that no missiles were in flight." Go figure.

I'm not sure we'll ever know the full story of the Norwegian rocket incident. Was Boris Yeltsin anxious to remind the U.S. that Russia is still a power to be reckoned with? Did the Russian military command fail to notify subordinates of a planned launch in order to test the reflexes of Russia's own early-warning system? Did the U.S. want to "probe" Russia's response to see if that radar system had fallen into disarray? Your guess is as good as mine.

Thanks for mentioning the other nuclear false-alarms. I plan to examine episodes such as "the training tape incident" in future articles. Although the Cold War is over, the relationship between military technology and human psychology remains front-and-center in our dangerous world.

Best Regards,

Moose

Steve,

It is certainly within the realm of possibility that we wanted to "light up" Russia's defensive radar network or in some surreptitious manner gain information about their command communications system.

Remember the device we placed on one of their submerged military communication cables to "tap" it, although the information in that case had to be physically retrieved at intervals. There is so much we don't know about top secret things going on on both sides. Every once in a while somebody spills the beans on one thing or another, but that's rare, and usually on the Russian side since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The extreme cat and mouse games played out in the air and on the seas were pretty hairy at times. Not to mention we lost dozens of aircraft that were actually shot down by the Soviet Union over the Cold War years (and not in a theatre of battle). Only some were publicly reported. Most people only know of the U2.

This link lists (only) the 17 publicly reported ones up to 1992, but one of the links on this page mentions 39 military and 1 civilian aircraft between 1946 and 1991:

http://www.aiipowmia.com/koreacw/cw1.html

Another link deals with 10 of them, and the 77 missing crew members:

http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/sovietunion/coldwar_working.htm

Greg