Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert; November 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Blair, Feiveson, von Hippel; 8 Page(s)

On January 25, 1995, military technicians at a handful of radar stations across northern Russia saw a troubling blip suddenly appear on their screens. A rocket, launched from somewhere off the coast of Norway, was rising rapidly through the night sky. Well aware that a single missile from a U.S. submarine plying those waters could scatter eight nuclear bombs over Moscow within 15 minutes, the radar operators immediately alerted their superiors. The message passed swiftly from Russian military authorities to President Boris Yeltsin, who, holding the electronic case that could order the firing of nuclear missiles in response, hurriedly conferred by telephone with his top advisers. For the first time ever, that "nuclear briefcase" was activated for emergency use.

For a few tense minutes, the trajectory of the mysterious rocket remained unknown to the worried Russian officials. Anxiety mounted when the separation of multiple rocket stages created an impression of a possible attack by several missiles. But the radar crews continued to track their targets, and after about eight minutes (just a few minutes short of the procedural deadline to respond to an impending nuclear attack), senior military officers determined that the rocket was headed far out to sea and posed no threat to Russia. The unidentified rocket in this case turned out to be a U.S. scientific probe, sent up to investigate the northern lights. Weeks earlier the Norwegians had duly informed Russian authorities of the planned launch from the offshore island of Andoya, but somehow word of the highaltitude experiment had not reached the right ears.