Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Sept 22, 1958: at 9:00 am Eastern Time, Mount Weather (aka High Point, aka Special Facility, aka Classified Location) the second oldest US continuity of government facility for use by designated officials during and after a nuclear war, began "continuous activation." (The oldest is Site R/Raven Rock Mountain, the backup Pentagon, aka Dick Cheney bat cave, where the Patriot Act was drafted following 9/11)



Built between 1954-58 by the Bureau of Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers at an estimated cost of about $2 billion (FY 23 dollars), Mount Weather sits on a 400+ acre campus with a 600,000 square-foot underground complex. Today it is run by FEMA.

The underground portion of the facility contains 20 office buildings, a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant, and a radio & TV studio with green screen that is part of the Emergency Alert System.



The site was connected to the Atomic Bomb Alarm System, a sensor network mounted on telephone poles adjacent to 99 cities and military bases that would detect a nuclear detonation by its intense thermal flash and signal this event to Mount Weather and other command posts.



The Bomb Alarm Display System, operational from 1961-1967, was intended to confirm whether nuclear weapons had detonated in the mainland US or at missile early-warning radar sites in Alaska, Greenland, and the United Kingdom. Knowing whether a nuclear attack had actually happened would help leaders decide how to respond, (assuming they weren't annihilated) and would help avoid launching missiles by mistake. The bomb alarm network, made by the Western Union Telegraph Company, monitored about 100 military sites and US population centers using sensors like the one on display. At Strategic Air Command, the North American Air Defense Command, the Pentagon, and other military headquarters, large electronic maps displayed the whole network. This system has since been replaced by more sophisticated space-based sensors.

The bomb alarm was not sensitive to lightning, sunlight, or electrical surges. Photocells inside the glass lens reacted only to the flash of a nuclear explosion. Western Union designed the Bomb Alarm Display System beginning in 1959, and in 1962 the network was complete. One drawback was that it responded only after an attack - it did not give advance warning. Another drawback was that it relied on commercial telephone or telegraph lines, which could be damaged or vaporized.

The only full-scale activation of the Mount Weather was on November 9, 1965, during the great Northeastern power blackout. The crash of TWA 514 (Boeing 727-231) into the mountain on December 1, 1974, killed 92 people and brought widespread and much unwanted public attention to the top-secret facility. Soviets were probably having a party.

History of The Mount Weather Research Observatory


Sept 22, 1979: a US Vela nuclear-test-monitoring satellite (launched 23 May 1969) detected the distinctive double-flash signature of a nuclear explosion over the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean. Although a White House scientific panel later dismissed the possibility, many speculated it was a clandestine Israeli test. President Jimmy Carter initially deemed the event to be evidence of a joint Israeli and South African nuclear test.

Vela incident

In 2018, two researchers published a forensic analysis paper detailing "strong" and convincing radionuclide and hydroacoustic evidence of a low-yield nuclear test that, when combined with the original Vela optical data, pointed conclusively toward a nuclear boom.

For the 40th anniversary in 2019, Foreign Policy magazine published a special section of eight articles by six experts examining relevant declassified documents and data and explaining "the political and strategic objectives of the key players at the time, and argue why a mysterious flash 40 years ago still matters today."


Blast From the Past

On August 31, 2020 the "Cold War International History Project" published a report examining what we know and don't know about this still-unsolved nuclear history mystery, based on a November 2019 oral history conference which included about a dozen people with direct knowledge of the incident:

Revisiting the 1979 VELA Mystery: A Report on a Critical Oral History Conference

A Potential Source of New Information

The discussions shed light on the existence of a source that was previously unknown to the conference organizers. During his remarks, Richard Muller mentioned the existence of a “rather substantial supplementary report [of the Ruina Panel] which was as I recall, it was as big as the initial report.”  Completed in early 1981, it covered “new material, including additional analysis done by NRL, including the sheep thyroids, which I believe are not in the first report.”

The National Security Archive has made attempts to locate this unquestionably important document, but its whereabouts remain obscure. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library does not have a copy in its collections; whether a copy is in the National Security Council Institutional Files under White House control remains to be determined. Requests for the report have been made to other agencies, but the Covid-19 crisis has, for now, delayed searches for such documents.

Sept 22, 1975: just 17 days after Squeaky Fromme had broken the glass ceiling on attempted presidential assassination - An Accountant from West Virginia, Sara Jane Moore fired a .38 caliber revolver at President Gerald R. Ford in San Francisco. Former Marine Oliver Sipple foiled her second shot and possibly saved Ford's life. Sara Jane Moore was taken into custody, where she told police: “If I had had my .44 with me I would have caught him.” “We were saying the country needed to change,” Sara Jane Moore explained. “The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution in this country.”
https://allthatsinteresting.com/sara-jane-moore




Ford died Dec 26, 2006. Dec 31, 2007, at the age of 77, Moore was released on parole after serving 32 years. She's 93 and still alive far as I know.


The nuclear "Football" has been spotted in some incongruous locations over the decades (Moscow, Hiroshima, the Vatican, Three Mile Island, aboard a SSBN). But, I doubt many have ever seen a US president actually holding it...in the Oval Office, no less, until now.



George W. Bush shakes hands with Air Force Lt. Col. John T. Quintas while the Marine Corps, Army, and Navy aides look on. Quintas was assigned to the White House Military Office from Nov. 2003 to Jan. 2006.

Best guess is this photo was taken near the end of his (Quintas) tour.



Could that be the "Biscuit" in Bush's left hand? The laminated card with the unique alphanumeric challenge-response codes a president must use to confirm his identity to the senior officer on duty at the National Military Command Center before he can authorize a nuclear strike.

However, it's more likely a challenge coin he's about to hand over to the military aide. The "Football" carriers are usually promoted directly after their tour.




Sept 22, 1961: "We use a camera like an X-Ray." At the conclusion of THE TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Arrival," Rod Serling gave a preview of next week's show, "The Shelter."




Next week has arrived...




Time to hit the beach...