SIGHTINGS


 
World Was Minutes From
Nuclear War - UK Almost Nuked
American Air Defense Command Almost Destroyed World
Influence Peddling And Intrigue At Root Of Explosion
From The Washington Spectator
From Dr. Richard X. Frager
From Stig Agermose
1-19-98
 
 
 
American Air Defense Command Almost Destroyed World/It Wasn't A Movie - In a new book, appropriately titled "From the Shadows" ((Simon and Shuster, $30)), Robert Gates, a former top White House national security adviser and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, tells of one night during the Cold War when the nuclear nightmare see in special effects movies almost happened. In a 3 a.m. phone call, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security assistant to the President, was told of a U.S. National Military Command Center report that the Soviet Union had just launched missiles carrying 220 nuclear warheads at targets in the United States. According to Gates, Brzezinski knew that President Carter had a "window" of three to seven minutes in which to decide whether to launch a retaliatory U.S. missile strike. Brezezinski held off waking the President for a minute or two to await a confirming report.
 
 
One minute before he was going to alert the President to push the nuclear button, Gates says Brzezinski got another call saying that the original report was inaccurate--that the Soviets had actually launched 2,200 warheads in an all-out attack. Then, just as Brzezinski was about to call the President to suggest vaporizing the U.S.S.R., he got a third call that someone had put a training drill in the computer at the North American Air Defense Command. Sorry--false alarm.
 
 
 
Secret US Accident Almost Nuked UK
 
 
Forty years ago, a B-47 aircraft bomber crashed into a nuclear weapons store in Lakenheath in the English countryside, setting on fire three Mark Six nuclear bombs. "Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officer says a miracle one Mark six with exposed detonators sheared didn't go," said Gen. James Walsh, the commanding officer of the U.S. Seventh Air Division, in a private cable to his superior in Washington. At the time of the crash and again in 1979, when the story first emerged in the press, The Pentagon denied that nuclear weapons were damaged or that civilians were ever at risk. The Washington-based National Resource Defense Council uncovered the declassified documents, including the smoking-gun cable, in the U.S. Library of Congress last year. The papers prove the occurrence of a near-disaster on English soil--and the U.S. government's scandalous initial cover-up.
 
 
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has revealed a previously secret investigation of a 1958 fire that destroyed a US-B-47 bomber at Greenham Common, a former US air base in Britain. Researchers traced "high concentrations" of uranium-235 around the base to the accident site. According to the report, the bomber was carrying a nuclear device, and radioactive ash and dust from the fire spread over more than 200 square miles of Berkshire. The "Scottish Daily Express" expressed anger that the accident "was kept secret for nearly 40 years" and reported that "demands are being made for an inquire into child cancer levels in the country."


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