Nuclear Specter Returns: 'Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War'

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/munich-conference-warns-of-greater-threat-of-nuclear-conflict-a-1018357.html



B-61 atomic bombs: The Ukraine crisis has increased the risk of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West.

The Ukraine crisis has dramatically worsened relations between NATO and Russia. With cooperation on nuclear security now suspended and the lack of a "red telephone," experts at the Munich Security Conference warn any escalation in tensions could grow deadly.

Nuclear Specter Returns: 'Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War'
By Markus Becker in Munich
February 13, 2015 – 02:31 PM

The scientists had no idea that their experiment could spell the end of civilization. On Jan. 25, 1995, Norwegian and American researchers fired a rocket into the skies of northwestern Norway to study the Northern Lights. But the four-stage rocket flew directly through the same corridor that American Minuteman III missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, would use to travel from the United States to Moscow.

The rocket's speed and flight pattern very closely matched what the Russians expected from a Trident missile that would be fired from a US submarine and detonated at high altitude, with the aim of blinding the Russian early-warning system to prepare for a large-scale nuclear attack by the United States. The Russian military was placed on high alert, and then President Boris Yeltsin activated the keys to launch nuclear weapons. He had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to issue the order to fire.

Yeltsin left the Russian missiles in their silos, probably in part because relations between Russian and the United States were relatively trusting in 1995. But if a similar incident occurred today, as US arms expert Theodore Postol warned recently, it could quite possibly lead to nuclear catastrophe.

Deep Mistrust

"Five or six minutes can be enough time, if you have trust, if you have communication and if you can put this machinery immediately to work," former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on the sidelines of last weekend's Munich Security Conference. Unfortunately, he argued, this machinery works very poorly today, and there is great mistrust.

[Journeyman]

1. I was in Minot, in '73, during the Yom Kippur War when Nixon took us to DefCon 3 . . .

Very few of my friends and family outside the military knew anything about the ramp up to confrontation.

What I learned was simple, and quite eye opening:

"In the nuclear age, the difference between the Home Front and the Front Line is simply a matter of perception: If you know we're at war, you are too."

Ultimately, all we have left is Viktor Frankl's Challenge:

"For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert -- alert in a two-fold sense:

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

[unhappycamper]

2. I was in Cambodia when Tricky Dick went on the idiot box telling folks

we would invade Cambodia.

[MisterP]

3. the difference between homefront and frontline is 90 minutes