Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Oct 3, 1952: the first British nuclear test with a yield of 25 kt are conducted in Operation Hurricane on the Montebello Islands in Western Australia. The plutonium implosion bomb was detonated inside the hull of the frigate HMS Plym. This made the United Kingdom the third country in the world to develop nuclear weapons.




WarGames: At 0400 on Oct 3, 1979, Col. William Odom, the National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s military assistant, was alerted by the Pentagon "War Room" that a West Coast radar had detected a Soviet SLBM in flight which was expected to strike 150 nautical miles off the Oregon coast.



It turned out to be false alarm, but as Odom wrote to Brzezinski in a top secret memo later that day, "It is a very chilling experience to pick up the phone and hear NORAD repeating ‘we have high confidence in the system’ and wonder how to use the remaining four or five minutes."

Two days later, Odom informed (memo above) Brzezinski the cause of the false alarm was still unknown...the radar did not malfunction, but that it may have been a piece of Soviet space debris falling out of orbit which was mistakenly categorized as a SLBM (this was confirmed by a later analysis).

For much more on this pucker factor incident, which could have ended very differently had it occurred during an international crisis, see:
Colonel Odom’s “Chilling” Four A.M. Phone Call

Possibly the first, though cryptic public reference to this incident was in former CIA Director Robert Gates's 1996 book "From the Shadows" on page 114. Gates offers some basic details that a missile was being tracked from the Soviet Union toward the Oregon coast and mentions Odom’s involvement, but provides no date. (likely censored by CIA) The National Security Archive noted Gates's reference in its previous electronic briefing book on nuclear false alarms published in March 2020 (which was actually an update of an earlier briefing on the same topic from March 2012) and then proceeded to track it down.

False Warnings of Soviet Missile Attacks Put U.S. Forces on Alert in 1979-1980

"As many critics have pointed out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes [sic] the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world." "The invasion of Iraq may well turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history."
- Lt Gen. William Eldridge Odom

Joe Biden: Hold my beer!


Doomsday was very near...! Dr. Strangelove for real...

Oct 3, 1968: Presidential candidate George Wallace introduced his running mate, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in Pittsburgh, PA.



"Four times governor of Alabama, four times a candidate for president, he was feared as a racist demagogue and admired as a politician who spoke his mind. A lightning rod for controversy, Wallace both reflected and provoked tensions in American society over more than four decades. This film traces the rise of the firebrand politician from his roots in rural Alabama to the assassination attempt that suddenly transformed him. Written by: Steve Fayer, Daniel Mccabe and Paul Stekler. Produced and Directed by: Daniel Mccabe and Paul Stekler. Based, in part, on "The Politics of Rage" by Dan T. Carter."

"Wallace, Settin’ the Woods On Fire": Watch an excellent documentary segment on the "Bombsey Twins" debacle here at about the 1 hr 33 min. mark:



I believe Wallace wanted to ask former Kentucky governor (and baseball commissioner) A.B. "Happy" Chandler to be his running mate, but oil baron mega donor Nelson Bunker Hunt didn’t think he was Xtreme right conservative enough, thus LeMay got the job.



Oct 3, 1984: FBI agent Richard W. Miller (1936-2013) was arrested and charged with giving counterintelligence information to the Soviets. Adam Schiff devotes a few pages to the prosecution of Richard W. Miller in his memoir MIDNIGHT IN WASHINGTON (2021).

This was no ordinary FBI surveillance operation: The “acquaintance” Grishin referred to was himself an FBI agent—a man who, out of greed, desperation, and spite, had begun an affair with Ogorodnikov and agreed to sell classified information to the Soviet government. Eventually, this man—Richard W. Miller, a 47-year-old Los Angeles-based counterintelligence agent on the Bureau’s Soviet squad—would become the first FBI agent ever convicted of espionage.

And the man who would finally secure Miller’s conviction in 1990—after three trials over the course of six years—was a young U.S. attorney in Los Angeles: Adam Schiff.

“I learned a lot about Russian tradecraft: how the Russians operate, who they target, the vulnerabilities they look for,” Schiff recalls. “They want people with access to information that is of use to them. They look for people who are sort of at the margins at what they do, that have financial problems, who have marital problems that they can exploit. And they found a very good target with Richard Miller.”
...
Miller served a total of nine years and was released in 1994. According to Stanley I. Greenberg, one of Miller’s former lawyers, Miller trained to become a computer technician while in prison, moved back to Utah and remarried. He died about three or four years ago, Greenberg told me.

Good long article, though they just had to wrap the Trump-Russia affair in it.
The Spy Case That Made Adam Schiff a Russia Hawk (May 2019)



Oct 3, 1986: 680 miles NE of Bermuda, the Soviet Yankee 1-class ballistic missile submarine K-219 was on patrol when seawater leaked into a missile tube, triggering an explosion of the missile’s volatile liquid fuel that killed three sailors and crippled the submarine.



Under very dangerous conditions, the crew managed to shut down the submarine’s reactors and stabilize it. Captain Igor Britanov was ordered to have the K-219 towed by freighter 4,300 miles to its homeport of Gadzhiyevo (near Murmansk), but it flooded and sank three days later.

The K-219 including its two nuclear reactors, 16 ballistic missiles, and 32-48 thermonuclear warheads sank in 18,000 feet of water to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain. It carried 16 R-27U liquid-fuel missiles powered by Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) with nitrogen tetroxide (NTO). This accident happened eight days before the Reykjavik Summit and just over five months after Chernobyl. Top secret minutes of a Politburo meeting published in 2016 reveal the Soviets learned critical lessons from that disaster, especially not to deny it.



Open U.S.-Soviet communication regarding the accident on the eve of the Reykjavik summit of Reagan and Gorbachev


On October 6, 1986, the Politburo discussed the intelligence value of the submarine if the United States attempted to salvage it. Deputy Defense Minister and Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy Admiral Vladimir N. Chernavin told the Politburo this posed no serious concerns:


It's almost like reading a movie script based on a novel.


In 1988, the Soviet research ship Akademik Mstislav Keldysh sailed to the location the K-219 went down and found the submarine upright on the ocean floor, but broken in two. They discovered that several missile hatches had been pried open and that the missiles and their nuclear warheads were missing. Oh, the horror!



It is unknown whether the United States retrieved some SLBMs and their nuclear warheads from the K-219, but there was precedent. In 1974, the CIA used the purpose-built (Howard) Hughes Glomar Explorer to secretly raise another sunken Soviet missile sub in the Pacific Ocean, the K-129.

"Azorian" (incorrectly identified as Project Jennifer by the media), was the most ambitious ocean engineering endeavor attempted by man. Following the accidental sinking of a Soviet missile submarine in March 1968, U.S. intelligence agencies were able to determine the precise location and developed a means of raising the submarine from a depth of 16,400 feet. The remarkable salvage effort of the K-129, which contained nuclear-armed torpedoes and one nuclear tipped missile as well as crypto equipment, was conducted with Soviet naval ships just a few hundred yards from the lift ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer.


In the Wake of a Sunken Soviet Submarine