My nuclear childhood: H-bombs, ICBMs, and cork-lined pop bottle caps as the surreal backdrop to 1961-62 tricycle adventures on a small planet

On Monday, Oct. 30, 1961, the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed was set off in an airburst test over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea. The Soviet ‘Tsar Bomba’ had a yield of 50 megatons, or the power of around 3,800 Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously. The mushroom cloud from the Soviet detonation of “Tsar Bomba” was so large that the photographers had a hard time capturing its full dimensions.

A Tu-95V bomber was modified to carry the weapon, which was equipped with a special parachute that would slow its fall, allowing the plane to fly a safe distance from the blast. The aircraft, piloted by Andrey Durnovtsev, took off from the  Kola Peninsula on October 30, 1961. It was joined by an observer plane. At approximately 11:32 a.m. Moscow time, Tsar Bomba was dropped over the Mityushikha Bay test site on the deserted island of Novaya Zemlya. It exploded about 2.5 miles (4 km) above the ground, producing a mushroom cloud more than 37 miles high; the flash of the detonation was seen some 620 miles away. The resulting damage was equally massive. Severny, an uninhabited village 34 miles from ground zero, was leveled, and buildings more than 100 miles away were reportedly damaged. In addition, it was estimated that heat from the blast would have caused third-degree burns up to 62 miles distant.

I lived on Church Street in Oshawa, Ontario. I was 4½ years old and riding my tricycle illicitly up to St. Gregory’s church, rectory, and school parking lot with my friend Paul Drumm, who lived around the corner on Elgin Street. We were usually scouring the pavement, a block or two from our home bases and stay-at-home moms, for cork-lined pop bottle caps, which sometimes listed prizes under the crumbly cork – a variation somewhat of Tim Hortons’ Roll Up the Rim to Win® coffee contest, introduced 25 years later in 1986, and which has become one of the world’s largest customer rewards programs. In the early 1960s, pop bottle caps were still made of fluted metal with a natural cork liner that formed a seal on a glass bottle. Cork was phased out as a sealant in later in the decade.

Flash-forward to Oct. 27, 1962 – three days short of a year later. I was 5½ years old now in kindergarten and it would be more than a year still until JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“There was a chill in the air in Washington, D.C., at least for the mid-fall season, on that autumn Saturday. The high only made it up to 12°C ( 54°F) instead of the normal 18°C (64°F ) and a record low of -1 °C (30 °F) that still stands for the date was set in 1962.

“It was also Day 12 of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Day on the Brink. The day that it almost all spun out of control…

“By Oct. 27, 1962, the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC), based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, had increased its readiness level to defcon 2 – one step short of nuclear war – and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were aimed at targets in the Soviet Union. United States Air Force Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr. was flying Mission 3127, his sixth foray over Cuba as part of Operation Brass Knob. Anderson was in his U-2 reconnaissance spy aircraft 14 miles sky-high at an altitude of about 72,000 feet. He had already made one pass over Cuba and was approaching the island shoreline when the Soviets, who had just selected American mainland targets and moved their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a firing position 15 miles from the U.S.-leased naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and fearful that Anderson’s mission would discover the fact, fired two SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at his U-2. One exploded behind Anderson and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, puncturing his pressure suit, probably killing him instantly. His U-2 broke apart, plummeted at least 60,000 feet, and crashed in Cuba…

“We can thank Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov for our date with doomsday dispensation on Oct, 27, 1962. The launch of the B-59’s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov held the rank of captain and was aboard but not captaining B-59 that day. Savitsky was. But that still left Arkhipov as second-in-command. Rounding out the senior trio of executive officers was political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov. While Savitsky and Maslennikov gave their consent to the submarine-based nuclear torpedo launch targeting the USS Randolf, Arkhipov, who died in 1998, refused, citing lack of confirmation that a nuclear war had started. He wanted B-59 to surface, which it did, refusing assistance from U.S. destroyers, and making its way slowly home to the Soviet Union.”

The final electronic link needed for pairs of land or sea-based missile operators to launch a nuclear strike is a row of randomly arranged numbers and letters for the Sealed Authenticator System code, one of the most closely-held secrets in the United States government, as the launch operators have to be confident that the emergency-action message actually comes from the President. The Air Force’s land-based Minuteman III missiles and the Navy’s submarine-based Trident II missiles require the eight-character Sealed Authenticator System code in order to be launched.

The National Security Agency produces the Sealed Authenticator System codes. Agency machines stamp the same computer-generated code of randomly arranged letters and numbers on two plastic cards. The machine then seals each card in a shiny metal foil. The code cards are nicknamed Sealed Authenticator System cookies because they look like wafer bars wrapped in tinfoil. The machine was specially built to do all the stamping and sealing itself, so no human eyes ever see the numbers and letters printed on the cards.

Some U.S. nuclear missiles are kept in a state of readiness that allows them to be launched within minutes after a decision to launch and are commonly said to be on “hair-trigger alert.” The military sometimes refers to this status as “high alert,” “ready alert,” “day-to-day alert,” “launch-on-warning status,” or “prompt-launch status.”

The exact number is classified, but experts estimate that the United States keeps a total of about 900 nuclear warheads on high alert. That estimate includes nearly all of the nation’s 450 long-range land-based missiles, each carrying one warhead, plus approximately 100 of its long-range submarine-based missiles, each carrying four or five warheads.

U.S. land-based missiles can be launched within five minutes of a presidential decision to do so, and submarine-based missiles within 15 minutes.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range.

Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During the Manhattan Project, he was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and responsible for the research and design of an atomic bomb. He is often known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Said Oppenheimer after the blast: “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The Truth is in Here? U.S. National Archives set to release final JFK assassination records Oct. 26

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland is set to release on Oct. 26 the final 3,000 never-before-seen documents the federal government says it holds related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.

An additional 34,000 previously redacted files are also scheduled for release with the redacted text restored for the new releases. Under the terms of The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the United States government was given 25 years to make public all Kennedy assassination-related files. That deadline expires Thursday. President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 21 that “subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” The records are to be released this week “unless the president certifies, as required by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm, including harm to intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. A statement from the White House on Saturday said: “The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted from filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which added more fuel to 28 years of inflamed public fascination with the idea of conspiracy and cover-up connected to the Kennedy assassination, despite the official finding of the 1964 Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released at 8 a.m. on July 24 a set of 3,810 documents, along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released July 24 were available online only initially, with access to the original paper records promised “at a future date.” The National Archives and Records Administration established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection, about 88 percent, has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the National Archives says.

Highlights of the July 24 release included FBI and CIA records and 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964. The set of documents released in July included 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. The redacted text is restored for the new releases.

Josh Sanburn, a writer for TIME, suggested last December “the files – many of which trace back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the 1970s – promise to be less about second shooters and grassy knolls and more about what the government, particularly the CIA, might have known about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.”

According to the National Archives, the final records release includes information on the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald. “The documents could also provide information on a CIA officer named George Joannides, who directed financial dealings with an anti-Castro group whose members had a public fight with Oswald on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963,” says Sanburn.

As President Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day. Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago, was the fourth United States president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Some conspiracies, however, are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.  In April 2016, then Republican presidential primaries candidate Donald Trump accused Canadian-born Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, a Cuban-American Christian preacher, of being alongside Lee Harvey Oswald several months before he shot the president, “channeling a National Enquirer story that the Cruz campaign has denounced as false,” wrote McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Maria Recio for the Miami Herald at the time. Responding in Indiana, Ted Cruz, challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, quipped: “I guess I should go ahead and admit that yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

The assassination of Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The world’s most dangerous day: Oct. 27, 1962

If you’ve ever found yourself looking for a specific date in history on the internet, perhaps wondering what day of the week it fell on, you are no doubt familiar with DayOfTheWeek.org and websites like it, which reliably, for the most part, quickly spit out the answer in a format such as this: “Oct. 27, 1962 was the 300th day of the year 1962 in the Gregorian calendar. There were 65 days remaining until the end of the year. The day of the week was Saturday.”

Fine as far as it goes. But if you actually chose this particular date – Oct. 27, 1962 – instead of saying, “There were 65 days remaining until the end of the year,” the sentence might have been re-written by DayOfTheWeek.org , without any hyperbole or dramatic overreach, to read: “The were no days remaining in history.”

There was a chill in the air in Washington, D.C., at least for the mid-fall season, on that autumn Saturday almost 54 years ago now. The high only made it up to 12 °C ( 54 °F) instead of the normal 18 °C  (64 °F ) and a record low of -1 °C (30 °F) that still stands for the date was set in 1962.

It was also Day 12 of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Day on the Brink. The day that it almost all spun out of control.

I was 5½ years old.

The late rock singer-songwriter and musician Warren Zevon would write in 1978 about Honduras: “I’m hiding in Honduras. I’m a desperate man. Send lawyers, guns and money the shit has hit the fan.”

Ditto for Havana and Cuba in the Fall of 1962.

On Oct. 27, 1962, the shit hit the fan. 

While the historically agreed upon facts of the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, running from Oct. 16 to Oct. 28, 1962 – triggered by the American response to the summer and early fall buildup of a Soviet offensive military posture in Cuba, including the clandestine deployment of ballistic missiles, followed by the United States Navy quarantine of the Caribbean island, and the resulting standoff between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev – have been documented extensively by historians and other commentators, Saturday, Oct. 27, 1962 would prove to be the beyond extraordinary end to an extraordinary week in mid-20th century diplomatic history: a day now known as the most dangerous day in history, although that remains a somewhat subjective, but perhaps not unreasonable, judgment.

Humans, both individually and collectively, in my experience, have woefully short memories. If you had the bad luck to be living in 1211 and facing the army of Genghis Khan at the Battle of Yehuling in present-day China, where his Mongol Empire defeated the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, that might seem like a pretty bad and dangerous day, or days and months, too. But I get the nuclear apocalyptic extinction difference between 1211 and 1962. Oct. 27, 1962, right from midnight Alaska Time on, was shaping up to be a very bad and dangerous day, indeed. It would come to be known as “Black Saturday.”

Most Americans still had only the beginning of an awareness of the U-2 aerial spy program and its super-secret photography, capable of taking high-resolution photos from the edge of the stratosphere over hostile countries, as CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers had been doing on a launched from Pakistan espionage mission on May 1, 1960, intending to overfly deep into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  (U.S.S.R.), but instead he was shot down by a Soviet S-75 Dvina high-altitude surface-to-air missile over what was then Sverdlovsk in the middle of the continent, near where Europe meets Asia.

Powers was able to eject and parachute to the ground where he was almost immediately captured. A high-value propaganda political prisoner,  Powers was released in a spy swap between the Soviets and Americans in February 1962, about eight months before the Cuban Missile crisis.

By Oct. 27, 1962, the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC), based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, had increased its readiness level to defcon 2 – one step short of nuclear war – and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were aimed at targets in the Soviet Union. United States Air Force Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr. was flying Mission 3127, his sixth foray over Cuba as part of Operation Brass Knob. Anderson was in his U-2 reconnaissance spy aircraft 14 miles sky-high at an altitude of about 72,000 feet. He had already made one pass over Cuba and was approaching the island shoreline when the Soviets, who had just selected American mainland targets and moved their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a firing position 15 miles from the U.S.-leased naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and fearful that Anderson’s mission would discover the fact, fired two SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at his U-2. One exploded behind Anderson and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, puncturing his pressure suit, probably killing him instantly. His U-2 broke apart, plummeted at least 60,000 feet, and crashed in Cuba.

With the entire American and Soviet military and intelligence communities focused almost entirely on Cuba at that moment, up in Alaska another U-2 pilot was about to make history, although many details of the still-top secret classified mission have remained hidden for years. In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the Soviet Union and the United States were still conducting their routine and now long-running since 1945 above-ground nuclear atmospheric testing in October 1962. Business as usual, missile crisis or no missile crisis.

In order to monitor the Soviet tests at Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean now in northern Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe lying at Cape Flissingsky on Northern Island, the United States sent U-2 planes to the North Pole to collect high-altitude radioactive air samples. Important work but with nowhere near the cachet of clandestinely doing high-level aerial reconnaissance photography over Cuba. Nobody at United States Strategic Air Command headquarters had apparently stopped to consider whether the air-sampling missions in the High Arctic ought to be put on hold during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

United States Air Force U-2 pilot Capt. Charles Maultsby from the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing took off on one such mission from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska at 12 a.m. local time Oct. 27, 1962, which was 4 a.m. in Washington. Maultsby’s return mission to the North Pole was scheduled to last eight hours. A Duck Butt air rescue plane accompanied him as far as Barter Island, off the northern coast of Alaska.

Half way to the North Pole, Maultsby, relying on the same type of celestial navigation that such great explorers as Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan had relied on in the late 15th century and early 16th century, found himself unexpectedly blinded by the aurora borealis, making it hard to distinguish one star from another because he was having trouble shooting several of the brighter stars with his sextant to get location fixes.

His compass was no help either. In the vicinity of the North Pole, the magnetic needle was jerked automatically downward, toward the earth’s surface, and north and south became impossibly confused.  At the time that he should have been landing back at Eielson Air Force Base, he began accidentally penetrating 300 miles deep into Soviet airspace. Maultsby did not know it yet, but he had crossed the border into the frontier of the Soviet Union, and he was more than a thousand miles off his assigned flight course, flying above the northern shore of the Soviet-controlled Chukotka Peninsula, the easternmost peninsula of Asia, and one of the most desolate places on earth.

At least six Soviet interceptor MiG fighter jets took off from Pevek Airfield and another airfield in Chukotka, tasked to shoot Maultsby, the American intruder, down. Using their supersonic speed, the Soviet pilots could ascend to 60,000 feet in a matter of minutes, but they could climb no higher. That still left them at least 10,000 feet below Maultsby’s U-2. The interceptor jets kept up with the American intruder for 300 miles and then peeled off to refuel.

Remarkably, Maultsby got turned around properly eventually and made it back to Alaska, gliding in on fumes after running out of fuel to a remote airstrip at Kotzebue Sound, a military radar station just above the Arctic Circle on the western tip of Alaska. Maultsby landed at Kotzebue after a flight of 10 hours, 25 minutes, the longest ever recorded for a U-2 spy plane.

The day was by no means over.

The B-59, a  Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon, was operating in international waters near Cuba.  An American destroyer, the USS Beale, knowing that B-59, the flagship Project 641 or Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarine of the Soviet flotilla, was below them, started dropping non-lethal practice round depth charges that sounded as loud as jackhammers down near their hull, hoping this would serve as a warning shot and cause B-59 to surface.

Other nearby U.S. destroyers from Task Group Alpha joined the USS Beale to pummel the submerged B-59 with more explosives.

And that was almost where history stopped on this very confusing day, already marked by the shooting down of one U.S. U-2 spy plane over Cuba while another from Alaska had violated Russian airspace and been chased by Soviet MiG interceptor fighter jets.

After more than five hours of the Americans dropping the depth charges down near his submarine, B-59 Capt. Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing his submarine doomed, and working on the assumption the third world war must have broken out, ordered B-59’s ten-kiloton T-5 nuclear torpedo be made ready to fire on the targeted USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the U.S naval task force off Cuba that Saturday.

As Edward Wilson wrote almost four years ago on Oct, 27, 2012 in The Guardian in a 50th anniversary piece about Oct. 27, 1962: “If the B-59’s torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. The next wave of bombs would have wiped out “economic targets,” a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died.”

Meanwhile, Wilson goes on to write, the Pentagon’s doomsday SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) scenario – “would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.”

We can thank Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov for our date with doomsday dispensation on Oct, 27, 1962.  The launch of the B-59’s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov held the rank of captain and was aboard but not captaining B-59 that day. Savitsky was. But that still left Arkhipov as second-in-command. Rounding out the senior trio of executive officers was political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov.  While Savitsky and Maslennikov gave their consent to the submarine-based nuclear torpedo launch targeting the USS Randolf, Arkhipov, who died in 1998, refused, citing lack of confirmation that a nuclear war had started. He wanted B-59 to surface, which it did, refusing assistance from U.S. destroyers, and making its way slowly home to the Soviet Union.

“If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life,” Wilson wrote.  “It was the most dangerous day in history.”

Later, Wilson notes: “The decision not to start world war three was not taken in the Kremlin or the White House,” Wilson wrote, “but in the sweltering control room of a submarine.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

Fill er up, Your Excellency: Petrol-pumping Bishop Bonaventure Finbarr Francis Broderick spent almost as many years as a gas jockey as he did a bishop

If you work long enough, many, if not most of us, have had the experience of being removed from a job we were doing, only to find ourselves soon doing something else very different and altogether unexpected. As today marks the first anniversary of soundingsjohnbarker, which saw its first blog post, “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” around this time of day a year ago on Sept. 3, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) 167 posts and 42,000 readers later, I’ve been there and done that. But few, I suspect, present such a vivid example as Hartford, Connecticut-born Roman Catholic Bishop Bonaventure Finbarr Francis Broderick, who went from being the auxiliary, and later coadjutor bishop of what was then the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana in Cuba in March 1905 to pumping gas in the Hudson Valley in Millbrook, New York, while writing a weekly column for the local newspaper, the Millbrook Round Table, founded in 1892, before being restored to an episcopal role in November 1939.

The request from the Vatican to restore him as an active bishop again after 34 years in church wilderness came after Broderick was discovered running the Millbrook gas station by the newly-appointed archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, then Archbishop Francis Spellman, out making the rounds in his new pastoral charge.

As an able seminarian marked to go places in the early 1890s at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, Broderick was also sent to study at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant’ Apollinare  and Pontifical Urbanian Athenaeum de Propaganda Fide before being ordained as a priest for the Archdiocese of Hartford on July 26, 1896 by Archbishop Francesco di Paola Cassetta, who would later go on to serve as the librarian of the Vatican Library.

When his former Italian instructor in Rome, Bishop Donato Raffaele Sbarretti Tazza, was appointed in 1900 as the ordinary of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana, he appointed Broderick as his secretary.

Broderick represented the Catholic Church in Havana on May 20, 1902 when the Republic of Cuba gained its symbolic, although not practical, independence from the United States, which had ruled Cuba for four years since its victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. While in Cuba, Broderick had to settle claims against the United States government because of damage done to church property during the Spanish-American War.

On March 1, 1905, Broderick resigned as coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana, and returned to the United States. While the details are murky, it appears Broderick had a falling out with the Holy See over financial matters, and was effectively sent into episcopal limbo by Baltimore’s long-serving and powerful Cardinal James Gibbons, with “no appointment, no pastoral duties, and no income other than a small stipend provided by Rome,” notes Rick Becker in an Aug. 31 article in the National Catholic Register, headlined, “The Strange Saga of the Bishop Who Ran a Gas Station for 40 Years.” Becker writes that Broderick’s “ecclesiastical exile compelled him to pump gas and hawk auto parts for decades on end.”

We do know that eight years after his return from Cuba to the United States, on Aug. 26, 1913, Bishop Broderick, then living in Saugerties, New York, near Millbrook, and his  business partner, former Democratic Congressman John Andrew Sullivan from Massachusetts’ 11th congressional district in Boston, who were associated with a contracting firm in Cuba known as Donovan & Philips, which had a water and sewer contract in Cienfuegos, Cuba, successfully sued Bishop Broderick’s brother, David A. Broderick, who had acted as agent for Donovan & Phillips, in Connecticut Superior Court for Hartford County, with Judge Marcus H. Holcomb awarding the bishop and congressman a judgment for $18,901.

Bishop Broderick, who had a doctorate from his time in Rome, wound up spending the First World War and the decades of the 1920s and 1930s living in obscurity while remaining obedient to the church, keeping his vows, and saying his daily office, but known not as a bishop but simply as “Dr. Broderick” (in the academic sense) who ran the gas station and wrote a weekly column for the Millbrook Round Table, until restored to a public role as Spellman’s auxiliary bishop and a hospital chaplain in Riverdale, New York in November 1939, serving for the remaining four years of his life, until he died in November 1943 at the age of 74, having been a bishop for 40 years, and a gas jockey almost as long.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22