GREATEST SECRETS OF THE COLD WAR

Popular Mechanics ^ | FR Post 4-11-2003 | BY JIM WILSON

[vannrox]

GREATEST SECRETS OF THE COLD WAR

They read like plots from thrillers, but each of these chilling events actually happened.

BY JIM WILSON

PM Photos by Brian Kosoff

Unsuspecting civilians are doused with radiation and germ weapons. Intelligence agents recruit psychic spies. Generals plan an attack on a Chinese nuclear weapons plant. A phantom army triggers the largest arms buildup in history. Politicians secretly construct an underground city to escape fallout. The United States comes within 7 minutes of launching its ICBMs. No, these aren't screenplays that were junked when the Soviet Union went belly up. Each of these events actually happened. For the two generations of Americans who fought and financed the Cold War, it was an epic struggle between us good guys and the "evil empire." Now, as the epoch fades into history, the declassification of tens of thousands of pages of secret documents has begun to cast a penetrating light on the era. As nine of these files reveal, truth can be stranger than fiction.

Target San Francisco Most people remember the Cold War as an era when the greatest threat was a nuclear strike launched by a foreign power. In reality, Americans were also at risk from testing by their own military. In addition to nuclear weapons, the U.S. military feared an attack by an enemy employing less publicized technologies. The most serious scenario was a biological warfare attack mounted against a seaboard city from a submarine or a small, fast patrol boat. According to declassified records, the Pentagon attempted to estimate how cities might be damaged by such an attack by ordering the U.S. Navy to spray a cloud of supposedly harmless bacteria over San Francisco. Historians say local health records show an upsurge in cases of a pneumonia-like illness after the 1950 experiment. They also claim that one death was caused by the attack. In 1966, the Pentagon ordered the U.S. Army to launch a similar biological attack on the New York City subway system. Details of this experiment remain classified.

Operation BRAVO A generation ago, the White House was gripped by reports that "Red" China was preparing to build its own nuclear weapons. Top officials considered several strategies to stop the Chinese program. In 1963, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned Unconventional Warfare Program BRAVO. It called for the United States to prevent the People's Republic from building a nuclear weapon by launching a secret attack against a weapons plant in north central China. The attack was to be carried out by a nonnuclear bombing mission or a 100-man sabotage team made up of Chinese Nationalists. The plan was vetoed on the urging of the State Department. China went forward with its nuclear weapons program, exploding its first device (right) at its Lop Nor test site on Oct. 16, 1964. ESP Troopers One of the strangest files reveals the use of psychics as spies. The CIA-financed project-code-named GRILLFLAME-was conducted at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), beginning in the early 1970s. The CIA says its ESP troopers, who used sensory deprivation (left), never produced useful information. Yet the project may still have been a success. It turns out that for two decades Stanford University had also worked on a secret over-the-horizon radar (OHR) system to spot Soviet ICBMs seconds after launch. The OHR system operated at the same microwave frequencies the Soviets believed were responsible for brain waves. For reasons he later said he never understood, OHR inventor Oswald G. Villard Jr. found himself assigned to GRILLFLAME. Some speculate that the ESP troopers were a ruse to divert Soviet spies away from OHR.

The Green Run Soon after the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in August of 1949, the United States decided it needed to learn more about the types of weapons its enemy was building. To find out, the Air Force conducted the Green Run experiment at the Hanford nuclear production plant (right). On the night of Dec. 2, 1949, the plant "released three tons of irradiated uranium fuel that had been allowed to cool only 16 days," reports a declassified Department of Energy document. The release-aimed at duplicating pollution from a Soviet reactor-placed more than 7800 curies of radioactive iodine, well-known to concentrate in human thyroids, into the air of the Pacific Northwest. By comparison, the accident at Three Mile Island released only 15 curies of radioactive iodine.

Blue Gemini Americans know NASA's Gemini program as a followup to the Mercury manned orbital missions. Few know about a shadow effort, Blue Gemini, that sought to recruit NASA technology and astronauts to fly military missions. At first, NASA warmed to the idea of sharing launch costs in exchange for allowing Air Force officers to fly as copilots. Documents suggest the military had offered NASA as much as $100 million. But as senior officers began laying out the details of their proposed operations, administrators of the civilian agency became less and less enamored with the idea of using astronauts as high-flying military observers. As with the proposed Operation BRAVO attack on China's nuclear weapons plant, State Department reservations would eventually quash the plans to militarize NASA's manned space flight. Blue Gemini would never fly. Doomsday Hotel Beginning in the 1970s, curious tales began to emerge from Washington, D.C., about a "doomsday hotel." Located near the nation's capital, it was said to be the ultimate fallout shelter. But only for the well-connected. In congressional testimony, military officials acknowledged the shelter-called Mount Weather?existed, but refused to disclose its whereabouts, lest it be targeted by a Soviet ICBM. With everyone's ICBMs now targeted at the open sea, the location of Mount Weather (right) has been revealed to be in Berryville, Virginia, about 75 miles from Washington. Today it houses the computer and phone-system hubs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 1995, the existence of a second doomsday hotel, located beneath the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was revealed. It is now open to group tours.

Secret Soviet Fallout The Russian government has acknowledged that a long-rumored series of accidents at Soviet nuclear weapons plants actually did take place. These events occurred beginning in 1948 at the Mayak complex in the southern Ural mountains, where the Soviets operated seven plutonium production reactors. Soviet records reveal that these events released into the air more than five times as much radiation as that produced by all the world's 500 above-ground nuclear tests plus the major nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Windscale (now Sellafield), England (in 1957). While the report may be new to the public, it was old news to the U.S. government. A highly secret monitoring unit called the Air Force Technical Applications Center has been operating a long-range detection program to monitor Soviet fallout for 50 years.

7 Minutes To Armageddon If you've ever had to give your boss really, really bad news, you can imagine how officers in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, felt when their radar screens lit up with 2200 Soviet missiles. The "launch on warning" protocols required confirmation, followed by the immediate notification of then-President Jimmy Carter. When other tracking stations reported all clear, the mystery deepened. With supposedly only 7 minutes left to launch U.S. ICBMs, the mystery was solved. Someone had put a training tape on the wrong machine-it was literally a textbook attack. After the 1979 incident, the Air Force moved its training operations to another location, and it has since upgraded its tracking center. Moscow's Phantom Arsenal During the 1980s, the rationale for the United States undertaking the largest weapons buildup in history was detailed in a widely circulated Defense Department document titled Soviet Military Power. The report estimated that the Soviet Union commanded weaponry that exceeded the U.S. arsenal in every category. It turns out many of those weapons never existed. Declassified CIA estimates of Soviet military power suggest the Defense Department's fears were caused by a phantom arsenal of nonexistent weapons. One example: The much-feared improved T-80 tank never existed. It appears analysts mistook an outmoded T-72 retrofitted with armored fabric side skirts for a new weapon. In fact, the Soviets weren't even maintaining the weapons they did have. At a press conference late last year, Gen. Eugene Habiger, top commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, acknowledged that during the 1980s "the Russians weren't modernizing their forces as we were." As a result, "The service life of their systems is coming to an end."

[vannrox]

A good read.

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[ScholarWarrior]

The plan was vetoed on the urging of the State Department. China went forward with its nuclear weapons program, exploding its first device (right) at its Lop Nor test site on Oct. 16, 1964.

Grrrrrr.

[Texas_Jarhead]

"The plan was vetoed on the urging of the State Department."

McCarthy tried to tell everyone.

[FairOpinion]

"Operation BRAVO
A generation ago, the White House was gripped by reports that "Red" China was preparing to build its own nuclear weapons.
It called for the United States to prevent the People's Republic from building a nuclear weapon by launching a secret attack against a weapons plant in north central China.

The plan was vetoed on the urging of the State Department. China went forward with its nuclear weapons program, exploding its first device (right) at its Lop Nor test site on Oct. 16, 1964."

"Soon after the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in August of 1949, the United States decided it needed to learn more about the types of weapons its enemy was building."

------

If we had gone in and bombed their nuclear facilities AT THE BEGINNING in a PREEMPTIVE strike, we could have avoided 60 years of cold war. Just think about it!

THIS is why we had to take out Iraq and all other rogue nations supporting terrorists and building WMD.

[bonesmccoy]

Here's additional information on the military Gemini missions. I believe this program was called MOL and was organized under USAF.

Another page exists at http://www.deepcold.com/deepcold/gem_main.html

There were several proposals for various orbital space labs. These proposals were eventually combined into the Apollo Applications Program, which led to Skylab.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/morl.htm

Gemini also had a different program called Dyna-Soar which was a paragliding system for land based recovery of the capsule (or should I say, "Spacecraft"...)

Perhaps the best opportunity for USAF control over manned spaceflight was VAFB's SLC-6.

[bonesmccoy]

yeah, but if we go in and actually act pre-emptively... well, gosh... then we'd have a situation where there would be no evidence that they actually have any weapons in the first place...and unless you find a smoking gun...well...then the whole thing is a waste of time.
/sarcasm off

[Husker24]

When other tracking stations reported all clear, the mystery deepened. With supposedly only 7 minutes left to launch U.S. ICBMs, the mystery was solved. Someone had put a training tape on the wrong machine-it was literally a textbook attack.

holy sh*t!

[Centurion2000]

And now for the really interesting part ... one of the Soyuz capsules had a functional 23mm autocannon installed on it.

[U S Army EOD]

Look up both T80 and T90 soviet tanks. They do exist.

[bonesmccoy]

http://www.sovietarmy.com/vehicles/t-80.html

if that US Army manual doesn't do it for a reader, then he can read this interesting page from Pravda (which claims that the Macedonians won't give up their T-80's).

http://english.pravda.ru/world/2002/08/06/33924.html

[bonesmccoy]

really? or are you just kidding?

[Nowhere Man]

And now for the really interesting part ... one of the Soyuz capsules had a functional 23mm autocannon installed on it.

I once read of a supposedly secret U.S. plan called "Blur Gemini in the book, "Out There" by Harold Blum (it's about UFO coverups) where there was a one-man Gemini capsule that had a laser cannon mounted in it. The plan came about as early as 1961/62. I'm sure the Soviets were on the hunting list but I don't think they were the only ones. B-)

[Nowhere Man]

"Blur Gemini" = "Blue Gemini"

[JusPasenThru]

Isn't that the incident upon which "War Games" was based?

[B-Chan]

Gemini also had a different program called Dyna-Soar which was a paragliding system for land based recovery of the capsule (or should I say, "Spacecraft"...)

Nope. The X-20 Dynasoar program predated Gemini and was completely different. The Dynasoar spacecraft was conceived as

a single-pilot manned spaceplane... (manned space bomber, reconnaisance platform, high speed test vehicle), with the launch vehicles at various times including Titan I, Titan II, Saturn I, and finally Titan IIIC. Cancellation on December 10 1963 came only eight months before drop tests from a B-52 and a first manned flight in 1964.

The Dynasoar itself would have been developed into Dynasoar II, III, and Dyna-MOWS (Manned Orbital Weapons System) versions which would have run the gamut of orbital supply, rendezvous and inspection, and orbital bombing. The basic single pilot X-20A Dynasoar had a limited internal payload and volume (450 kg in a payload bay behind the cockpit, enough for another crew member or used for military/scientific payloads).

After its cancellation, the Air Force pursued futher development of manned spaceplanes through the PRIME, ASSET, X-23, and X-24 programs, with suborbital launch of subscale lifting body designs and B-52 drop tests of the X-24A and X-24B lifting body designs into the mid-1970's. Reportedly there was also a black program leading to suborbital flight and reentry of a full-size unmanned lifting body patterned after the NASA HL-10. In the end, the Air Force was pressured by the Nixon Administration to accept participation in the space shuttle program in lieu of separate development of their own designs.

Building the Dynasoar would have given the United States an orbital spaceplane thirty-eight years ago. Instead, our nation is stuck with the struggling Space Shuttle and vaporware Orbital Space Plane programs -- neither of which can do what Dynasoar could have done in 1964.

X-20 Dynasoar image (artist's conception)

[bonesmccoy]

Agreed... my memory was confounded by the existance of Gemini paraglider designs which replaced the parachute with a paraglider concept.

[quietolong]

Patten should have been told OK GO Ahead! in 1945

[lilylangtree]

". . . 7800 curies of radioactive iodine, well-known to concentrate in human thyroids, into the air of the Pacific Northwest . . ."

Lawsuits aplenty against Hanford over this action is still in the works by the offspring of people who basically got sprayed. Various forms of cancer resultant in the original people and their offspring are alleged in the lawsuits.

[RightOnline]

"After the 1979 incident, the Air Force moved its training operations to another location, and it has since upgraded its tracking center."

I was a young copilot in SAC at the time.......and I remember this. Of course, never knew just how close we came............