Quote:Octogenarian shares notes, photos of his atomic artillery recovery incident

FORT SILL, Oklahoma July 12, 2021 -- Stationed in the 22nd Ordnance Company, in Munich, West Germany, in the chaotic days following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the crash of a decommissioned atomic cannon on the autobahn tested a new Army second lieutenant who was put in charge of recovery efforts.

Now, nearly 58 years later and living in Fox Lake, Illinois, 81-year-old Paul Jakstas was removing paperwork and other items he didn’t believe his family would be wanting when he came upon his notes from that moment in Army history. Being the village historian, he said he dealt with things like this and began checking the internet to see if there was someone or some agency that might appreciate what he’d kept.

That’s when he came upon Fort Sill and realized that Atomic Annie resides here in Artillery Park.
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Nov. 22, 1963, Jakstas played in a platoon basketball game at a neighboring post when the game stopped with word of Kennedy’s death. Although his unit went on alert status, no immediate threat materialized.

Instead, early Nov. 23, Jakstas’ unit received an emergency call about the accident that involved vehicles carrying an artillery piece. Seven Soldiers were injured with two trapped in the wreck. Those two were later removed, and all survived.

Despite serving in his position less than four months, Jakstas earned the trust of his company and battalion commander who selected him for the recovery operation of the atomic cannon.

“As the designated recovery officer, I mobilized some wheels/tracks and headed north on the autobahn,” he said.
Arriving on scene, he found the 84-foot long gun with its fore and aft attached trucks askew blocking traffic. While a warrant officer handled the physical recovery matters, Jakstas managed the public affairs details. This included updating angry West German officials upset about the closed thoroughfare, media queries, and high ranking U.S. Army officers checking on progress of the recovery.

With the world in turmoil over Kennedy’s assassination, Jakstas said media interest was minimal. The wrecked vehicles were removed from the accident scene by Nov. 25 and the autobahn soon reopened.
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Dr. John Grenier, Field Artillery Branch and FA School historian spoke of the value of having these documents. He called the notes “primary source documents,” which means they were made by a person who was at the scene when it occurred.

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“It was a world in which the Cold War was the dominant military threat of the Army and other U.S. military branches,” he said.


Although the U.S. was involved in Vietnam that war wouldn’t escalate for another two years. So, the Army was focused on readiness to counter large-scale combat operations in central Europe brought on by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, he said.

When the Cold War ended in 1989, that threat dissolved, but Grenier said, “there’s a lot of similarities between the early 1960s and what I believe we are going to see in the early 2020s.”

US Army article

Quote:Film Description:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9RrYc2hjh0

This amazing 1962 U.S. Air Force training film BROKEN ARROW PROCEDURES shows  the procedures used in an accident involving a nuclear weapon. In this case, a airborne B-52 has caught fire while carrying a nuclear weapon.  The film was likely made in response to the Goldsboro incident of 1961, in which an atomic bomb survived an airplane crash and fire.  It was one of the most terrifying moments in the history of the Air Force, SAC and the Cold War, since after the incident it was determined that most of the bomb's safety mechanisms had failed and, in a terrifying scenario, the device could have actually detonated.  The incident led to a wholesale reappraisal of safety standards and serves as an enduring lesson to nations that have atomic weapons of the necessity of redundancy with these safety devices. 

The film suggests different scenarios, including a nuclear detonation, or a "dirty" fire that presents a hazard to personnel due to nuclear radiation, or a situation in which atomic material is spread over a large area by a crash.  In these instances a full scale disaster response, including mass evacuation of personnel and civilians in the area, is needed. 

The film includes footage at the 13 minute mark of a B-52 making a hard landing on the runway and its gear collapsing.  It also uses b&w footage of a military accident in 1959, with an airplane aflame and first responders arriving on the scene.

The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash was an accident that occurred in Goldsboro, North Carolina, on January 24, 1961. A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two Mark 39 nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air, dropping its nuclear payload in the process. The pilot in command ordered the crew to eject, which they did at 9,000 feet (2,700 m). Five men successfully ejected or bailed out of the aircraft and landed safely. Another ejected but did not survive the landing, and two died in the crash. Controversy continues to surround the event as information newly declassified in 2013 reinforced long-held, public suspicions that one of the bombs came very close to detonating.

In 2013, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser published a book, Command and Control, in which he presented a declassified 1969 document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. In the report, entitled "Goldsboro Revisited," written by Parker F. Jones, a supervisor of nuclear safety at Sandia National Laboratories, Jones says that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe," and concludes that "The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52."

Quote:In this 1966 American comedy film directed by the forty-year-old Canadian-bron Norman Jewison tells the story of a Soviet submarine crew that accidentally runs aground on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. When the crew ventures ashore searching for assistance from the locals, fears of a Communist invasion are caused. The Soviets attempt to avert these fears by claiming they are Norwegian. This film not only mocks the intense anti-Soviet paranoia of American society, but also helps to "humanize" the U.S.S.R. The locals and the Soviet crew eventually work together to save a young boy from falling from a church steeple. Ultimately, the Soviets, the "other," are shown as not so different from "us."
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming

Quote:Hands Across America was a public fundraising event on Sunday, May 25, 1986, when 5 to 6.5 million people held hands for 15 minutes in an attempt to form a continuous human chain across the contiguous United States. The attempt to have a complete line of people across the country failed, although the number of participants would have been sufficient to succeed if they had been spread out over the full length of the planned course. The various gaps in the line between participants were filled using ribbons, ropes, or banners.

(05-25-2023, 09:45 PM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: May 25, 1986, Hands Across America happened.

Quote:How Threads (1984) came into being. Its progress can be traced through The War Game and A Guide To Armageddon. This is an extract from my new book, ATTACK WARNING RED: HOW BRITAIN PREPARED FOR NUCLEAR WAR, and features an interview with the director of Threads, Mick Jackson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYIhJL671Lo

Quote:The A to Z of Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer is the most cult-iest of cult movie directors.

Films like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (1965), Vixen (1968) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) still pack out revival houses. His work continues to inspire critical analysis and attract new fans. Artwork from his movie remains in high demand for posters and T shirts.

Here’s an A to Z about the famous auteur.

A is for Alzheimer’s Disease, which afflicted Meyer during the last years of his life prior to his death in 2004, and is a downer of a way to start this article but you can’t ignore it happened. Meyer had an incredible life – lots of sex, fame, money, laughs and a job he loved, even some critical respect. He died a wealthy man with a devoted fan base – there was no Ed Wood/DW Griffith style languishing in obscurity and poverty for old Russ. That doesn’t guarantee you’ll go out well, though, and it didn’t for Meyer, whose health declined in the mid 1990s and developed into full blown Alzheimer’s. (Mental illness ran in the family – his mother and sister wound up in psychiatric hospitals.)
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E is for Eve Meyer, Meyer’s second wife, associate producer, lead model, star of his second film Eve and the Handyman and overall muse. The two drifted apart personally and professionally by the early ‘70s and, like many an auteur director, Meyer was never as good once he broke up with his wife (eg George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich). She died in a plane crash on the Canary Islands in 1977.

F is for feminism, something Meyer is occasionally accused of, mostly due to having three strong female leads in Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and making a film about female sexual desire, Vixen. But try arguing that feminism after watching Charles Napier beat, strangle, stomp and electrocute Shari Eubank to a lingering death in Supervixens (1975); or Lorna Maitland learning to love sex by being raped in Lorna (1964) and then being murdered for liking sex; or have Alex Rocco in Motorpsycho (1965) ignore looking after his recently raped wife so he can go looking for revenge and flirt with Haji; or all of the comic rape in Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens. One thing is certain though – Meyer’s films with female protagonists (Faster Pussycat, Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Mondo Topless) are a hell of a lot more entertaining and hold up much better than those where the action is driven by the men (Blacksnake, Supervixens, Finders Keepers Lovers Weepers). He never seemed to learn that lesson though and kept drifting back to stories with male protagonists.
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H is for homophobia, something Meyer is accused of, mostly because (spoilers) all the LGBTI characters in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls get murdered but also because of the gay caricatures in The Seven Minutes (1971), Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, and Haji being a tragic doomed lesbian in Faster Pussycat. However, Meyer always depicts lesbian lovemaking as a positive, enjoyable thing (especially in Vixen) – indeed the climax of Cherry Harry and Raquel (1970) features two women happily going at it intercut with scenes of two men pointlessly shooting each other to death, making a surprisingly affecting point about sex being more worthwhile than violence. I am aware this doesn’t clear him of homophobia and he films everything very much through a straight male gaze (or leer), but he at least had queer characters in several of his movies when that wasn’t super common – half the characters in Up!, for instance, are bisexual.
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W is for Williams, Edy, who Meyer met during Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and became his wife number three. He overlooked her for lead roles in The Seven Minutes (she played a support) and Blacksnake. Meyer was going to put her in a star vehicle, Foxy but it was never made. Are you surprised to hear the marriage didn’t last? You know something, Edy Williams should have played the lead in Blacksnake – it would have been more fun.

X is for X rating which Meyer alternatively battled and embraced throughout his career. Battles with censors cost him a lot of money but he made it back in the success he enjoyed.
The A to Z of Russ Meyer

Quote:Space colonies are now being considered seriously by some people. The one in the picture [above] is controlled throughout by a big central computer. The colony is positioned 240,000 miles (350,000km) from Earth and about the same distance from the Moon. It consists of a great tube 430 feet (130m) across. This tube forms a ring over a mile in diameter. The tube houses the main living and agricultural areas and can support up to 10,000 people. The big wheel rotates once a minute. This makes an artificial gravity on the surface of the tube away from the center. "Up" is towards the hub and "down" is away from it.

Sunlight is reflected from huge mirrors that can be adjusted to give as much or as little sunlight as required in different parts of the tube. The sunlight also gives the energy to drive the generators which produce the colony's electricity.

Long "spokes" attach the tube to a central hub. At the hub there are docking ports for spaceships and vast antenna arrays for all the colony's communications with Earth.

Quote:Enterprise Incidents is a gen Star Trek: TOS fanzine. It was a joint production of The Science Fiction Comic Association and the Star Trek Federation of Fans. "Enterprise Incidents" mostly contains interviews, articles and clippings.

A bit of an odd duck, this zine straddled the line between semi-pro and fan-created content. Starting in issue #6, it printed fan fiction and fan art, but it is unclear how long this continued, perhaps only until issue #10.

When James Van Hise began adding non-Star Trek articles before changing the title completely and becoming this slick magazine, the zine was called Enterprise.

"Enterprise Incidents" ran for at least 33 issues. From issue #25, the cover banner incorporates a subtitle, "SF Movieland", and this new name begins to grow in size over the next few issues, to help the magazine compete with "Starlog" in the newsstands and comic shops. There also exist Special Collectors Issues that reprint early original issues, sometimes two old zines in one new, that had been long out-of-print.

Some of the artwork by Ralph Fowler can be found here.

It had a short-lived sister zine, a cookbook called, The Alien Cook.

Enterprise Incidents (US Star Trek: TOS zine)

Quote:A SHORT VISION: Ed Sullivan’s Atomic Show Stopper

    “I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated…”

    -- Ed Sullivan introducing the apocalyptic short film A SHORT VISION on the May 27, 1956 broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show[1]

    “Years later I met a man from Canada who had shoulder length dark hair, but in the center of his head was a small spot where his hair grew out a silvery white color. I asked him about it, and he told me that he was a medically documented case of a person whose hair had turned white from fright. As a child, he had seen A SHORT VISION while alone in a house, and he experienced extreme panic and terror for some time, and one result was that his hair began to grow out white from that one spot on his head.”

    -- Excerpt from a remembrance written for CONELRAD by Michael Mode, baby boomer, who also saw the end of the world on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.



INTRODUCTION: Sunday Night at the Apocalypse

From the vantage point of today’s media-saturated, 24/7, TV-in-every-room, on-demand world, the concept of a must-see, live, prime time television show starring an awkward newspaperman nicknamed “Old Stone Face” is hard to fathom.[3] Throw in the fact that the show was a bona fide institution for over two decades and the premise begins to sound like science fiction. The closest current analog to The Ed Sullivan Show in terms of popularity is FOX’s American Idol, but Idol producers would sell what is left of their souls to get Sullivan’s audience share. The proudly untelegenic host dominated Sunday nights in an era well before TV fractured into 500 channels. But today Ed Sullivan’s significance to broadcasting is practically unknown to Americans born after the baby boom generation.

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Quote:Retired Navy Capt, Edward Beach invented the football during the Eisenhower administration. Actually, he devised a set of footballs containing the presidential orders for a nuclear attack and planned to have them scattered around the country. The rest is history. For more than 30 years new presidents have been given briefings-they last about 15 minutes--on the football. But most show little interest--not even John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. As McGeorge Bundy, his national-security adviser, explains it, "He was not the type of man to inquire about how to drop a bomb."

Fumbling The Football: Now It Can Be Told (Newsweek, Oct 6, 1991)

(05-27-2023, 10:41 PM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Here's the Freija style short info-graphic thread on how that shotgun cannon was fabricated.

(05-26-2023, 12:27 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Since mermaid's are trending (due to Netflix) I came across a few vintage one's.

(05-28-2023, 08:41 AM)BIAD Wrote:

(05-26-2023, 12:27 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Since mermaid's are trending (due to Netflix) I came across a few vintage one's.

This one has been sitting in the back of BIAD's shed for a while, so if I may, I'll leave it here.
(Big fan of Higherside Chats and the now slowed-down Cooper Vortex!)

Quote:Again, this affected poor people. This was a poor man's drink.

GL: Another thing that's interesting about this story is that the government did something similar with marijuana in the 1970s.

DB: Right. The Paraquat spraying. The government was trying to get rid of marijuana plants in Mexico, and they sprayed plants with this herbicide that they thought would kill them. But it didn't kill them all. What it did was load the plants with poison.

The government basically said, "Oh well." This was basically the government response to the poisoning in the 1920s. "Oh well, you're an evil lawbreaker. If you get poisoned, that's your problem."

GL: What do you think this all says about prohibition and the war on drugs?

DB: It shows that moral crusades are really dangerous. People really do believe that they're on the side of the angels, and that the ends justify the means.
The US government once poisoned alcohol to get people to stop drinking

Quote:I had never gone on a cruise before, never harboured any interest. But when I caught wind of Spy Cruise, I was deeply intrigued.

A lecture series by covert operatives? Spies on a boat? My one reservation – and it was fleeting – was along the lines of "I hope al-Qaeda doesn't find out about this ship."

So I bought a ticket. And that's how, last week, I found myself chatting up American spies in the Caribbean.
I was targeting one in particular: Michael Hayden, a man who has probably forgotten more state secrets than most spies will ever know.

The Air Force general acted as president George W. Bush's eyes and ears while heading an ultrasecretive electronic-eavesdropping agency. Then he was made head of the Central Intelligence Agency, a job that is like being the president's brain – and covert fist.

Once at sea, it wasn't hard to buttonhole Hayden, a featured Spy Cruise speaker.

"I'm as much of a civil libertarian as the next guy, frankly," he told me when we sat down together. He argued that the CIA had been very restrained during the war on terror. "The little voice in your head says be careful whatever you do – you're going to have to live with the consequences the rest of your life."

He was so affable I had to keep reminding myself that spymasters are the most Machiavellian men on the planet. In Langley, Va., he would have helped decide who gets killed in Waziristan and Yemen – the badlands where CIA drone planes blow up presumed terrorists with Hellfire missiles. Recently retired, Hayden had traded his four-star general's epaulets for civilian shirt sleeves.

When we docked, I went on a guided horse ride through a rain forest – the general, I heard, swam with dolphins.

Casino Royale

My unofficial maxim for Spy Cruise was this: "All work and no play makes Jack Bauer a dull boy."
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Today, Hayden likes to point out that Obama has stuck with many controversial CIA programs. He is outraged, however, that the administration ordered a criminal investigation into the spy service – specifically a probe of the CIA's destruction of videotapes showing "waterboarding" interrogations of top al-Qaeda terrorists.

The general didn't sound like much of a civil libertarian as he expressed fears that "risk aversion" is hobbling the CIA. "When you're operating out there, somebody's got to have your back. And it's got to be your government, not a particular administration," he told me. "What the agency has gone through in the last two years has shaken that trust."

Spies should be encouraged to be aggressive as lawfully possible, he argued.

Quote:Four people have died after a houseboat in Italy sank during a birthday party attended by intelligence officials from Italy and Israel.

The incident on Sunday sent some two dozen guests to various hospitals including Israeli officials and guests flown by clandestine private jets back to Israel for treatment, according to an Israeli official.

The dead included two members of Italian intelligence agencies, Tiziana Barnobi, 53, and Claudio Alonzi, 62, as well as a retired member of Israeli intelligence named Shimoni Erez, 60, and the co-owner of the boat, Anna Bozhkova, 50. The Israeli official confirmed, on the condition of anonymity, that about 10 current or former Israeli intelligence officers had been flown to hospitals in Israel via two private jets.

The birthday party on an island in northern Italy’s Lake Maggiore was described in the Italian press as a “convivial meeting,” that mixed official and personal bonding after a series of meetings between the two agencies.

“It was a routine social event mixing business and socialising and a terrible tragedy for both Italy and Israel occurred,” said the official. “Because of the nature of some of the guest’s work, steps were taken to immediately repatriate for medical care and to protect identities.”

Italian police said the 52-foot boat, which was designed for 15 passengers, was badly overloaded with 20 guests and two crew members as it returned guests from a party on a small island to shore. During the short trip, a sudden storm swamped the overloaded boat as it sank, sending guests swimming for shore.

At least five Italian passengers were taken to local hospitals before government officials had them transferred anonymously to other facilities to further protect their covert identities.
VICE

Quote:To Look A Demon In The Eye: Nuclear Tests and Rapatronic Imaging Standard

For the early nuclear weapons scientists, being able to observe the rapidly changing matter in nuclear explosions was vital to their understanding of the phenomena and the effects. Several aspects of the blast (e.g. the blinding light, the speed of the nuclear reaction in the bomb, and the need to be miles away from the detonation) made it very difficult to capture the initial stages on film.

In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission contracted innovative photographic engineer Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton and two colleagues, Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier – their mission, improve imaging results.

By 1950 EG&G, Inc. had invented a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. Enter the rapatronic (for Rapid Action Electronic) shutter – a shutter with no moving parts that could be opened and closed by turning a magnetic field on and off.

Quote:One week later, the general returned to the White House with his answer. “WarGames,” it turned out, wasn’t far-fetched. “Mr. president,” he said, “the problem is much worse than you think.”

Reagan’s question set off a series of interagency memos and studies that culminated, 15 months later, in his signing a classified national security decision directive, NSDD-145, titled “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security.”

The first laptop computers had barely hit the market; public Internet providers wouldn’t exist for another few years. Yet NSDD-145 warned that these new machines — which government agencies and high-tech industries had started buying at a rapid clip — were “highly susceptible to interception.” Hostile foreign powers were “extensively” hacking into them already; “terrorist groups and criminal elements” had the ability to do so, too.

General Vessey could answer the president’s question so promptly — and national-security aides could compose NSDD-145 in such detailed language — because, deep within the bureaucracy, a small group of scientists and spies had been concerned about this looming threat for more than a decade.

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The main author of Reagan’s NSDD-145 was Donald Latham, the Pentagon’s liaison to the National Security Agency — and a former N.S.A. analyst himself. General Vessey had assigned him to answer Reagan’s question on “WarGames” (Could something like this really happen?). Mr. Latham answered as he did (The situation is much worse than you think.) because he knew that the N.S.A. had long been hacking into the communications systems of the Soviet Union and China — and what we were doing to them, they could someday do to us.

Mr. Ware had been among the first to draw this conclusion. Mr. Latham knew about it early on because the two were longtime friends, Mr. Ware having served on the N.S.A.’s scientific advisory board. The N.S.A. was the most secretive branch of the American intelligence community. Reagan’s screening of “WarGames” brought Mr. Ware’s concerns into high policy-making circles for the first time. And it sparked the first public controversy over the tensions between security and privacy on the Internet, as well as the first public power struggle about the subject between the N.S.A. and Congress — a debate and a struggle that persist today.

‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack

Quote:Supposedly causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."

About seven months later, U.S. warning systems generated three more false alerts. One occurred on 28 May 1980; it was a minor harbinger of false alerts on 3 and 6 June 1980. According to the Pentagon, what caused the malfunctions in June 1980 was a failed 46¢ micro-electronic integrated circuit ("chip") and "faulty message design." A computer at NORAD made what amounted to "typographical errors" in the routine messages it sent to SAC and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) about missile launches. While the message usually said "OOO" ICBMs or SLBMs had been launched, some of the zeroes were erroneously filled in with a 2, e.g. 002 or 200, so the message indicated that 2, then 200 SLBMs were on their way. Once the message arrived at SAC, the command took survivability measures by ordering bomber pilots and crews to their stations at alert bombers and tankers and to start the engines.

Yet, defense officials have been reluctant to acknowledge organizational failings, instead blaming mistakes on 46¢ chips or individuals inserting the wrong tape. Treating the events of 1979 and 1980 as "normal accidents" in complex systems, Sagan observes that defense officials are reluctant to learn from mistakes and have persuaded themselves that the system is "foolproof."

The 3 A.M. Phone Call

(01-28-2023, 07:16 PM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Today in 1986: The Space Shuttle Challenger’s mission STS-51-L external fuel tank exploded and the shuttle disintegrated 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, FL, killing all six crew members, and New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe. Investigators found failure of O-ring seals in the right solid rocket booster was the cause.

The crew on board the Challenger:
Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnick, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair.



My mom was a teacher then and was quite ecstatic to hear this news AND she knew Gregory Jarvis. She had a tv in her classroom and watched in horror with her class. School was promptly cancelled and remained closed the next day. I remember my mom went into shock & deep depression from this tragic day forward.