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Former US Airman Tells UN an Accidental Nuclear War Was Narrowly Avoided in 1962

A former US misileer told the UN about a close call that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Screengrab: Interview of Bordne by Aaron Tovish, directed by Christian D. Bruun, courtesy of Bruce Blair

At any given moment, the world is just a few minutes away from a nuclear catastrophe, missiles standing ready in silos around the world waiting for a short burst of computer signals to let them loose. It's the highest stakes game there is—but even so, mistakes do happen.

John Bordne, a 73-year-old former missileer, claims he witnessed such a mistake during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis while working as a flight control specialist at a missile launch control centre in Okinawa, Japan, one of the US's four bases in the region. His job was to keep the missiles prepped for launch at a moment's notice. Today, Bordne told the UN about the incident via Skype at a meeting organized by the government of Chile and anti-nuclear groups Global Zero and Mayors for Peace.

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Bordne asserts that the US came shockingly close to starting a nuclear war by accident during a midnight shift on October 28, 1962. According to Bordne, the US nearly launched a nuclear strike against Russia when a launch order was mistakenly sent out for all 32 missiles in Okinawa, tacked on to the end of a weather report. All the officers' launch codes matched up, but the threat level remained at Defcon 2. Missiles could only be launched at Defcon 1.

For a harrowing few minutes, it seemed like the nuclear missileers of Okinawa were about to do what they were hired to do.

"Nobody wants to begin the end of the world"

The only thing that stopped the crews from launching the missiles at the last minute, Bordne says, was suspicion. Why would an order be sent out while at Defcon 2? And why would it be tacked on to the end of a weather report? A lieutenant who was about to follow through with the order was held at gunpoint by two airmen, who were ordered by a captain to shoot the lieutenant if he tried to launch the missiles, Bordne contends. When the government realized its mistake, the men were ordered to stand down, and nobody breathed a word about it afterward.

"It's hard to believe that if we had to launch these missiles that we were in the last minutes of our life, and that in days there would be no life left on the planet," Bordne says in an interview filmed by documentarian Christian D. Bruun and screened at the meeting. "Nobody wants to begin the end of the world."

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Bordne's account first appeared in an unpublished personal memoir, but was only covered in Japanese news media in March of this year, and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in October. Although no official information about the incident has been released by the US government—he maintains his memoir was approved by the Air Force—Bordne has his supporters. One of them is, Bruce Blair, a Princeton researcher on nuclear command and control systems and MacArthur Fellowship Prize winner, who also spoke at the UN meeting today.

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"I've studied nuclear command and control, the organizational culture, the field procedures, safeguards, and vulnerabilities, for a long, long time," Blair told me when I asked him why he believed Bordne. "The account does not shock me in any way or seem out of the ordinary, except in this case, all of the codes apparently matched and there was not much daylight between a launch and standing down the force."

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst working in nuclear strategy who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, also spoke at the UN meeting via Skype, and said that many of the key details in Bordne's account are plausible.

Blair said that there is actually a long history of human error bringing the world to the brink of launching a nuclear war. Bordne's account was hardly the last time such a mistake was made, but the farce did get remarkably far. Often, Blair said, the problem is a technical malfunction, as in 1979 when a NORAD training tape caused computers to mistakenly report that the Russians were launching a nuclear strike. The information was relayed to top officials, who caught the false alarm.

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Bordne and Ellsberg Skyping in to the meeting. Screengrab: UNTV

But why has there been no official word on Bordne's account? "Most of these kinds of incidents get swept under the rug," Blair told me. "There are mistakes made all the time, and certainly back in those days, there were a lot of people looking the other way."

Today, nuclear command and control in the US is heavily computerized and much less vulnerable to the kinds of human error that can lead to a fatal mistake, Blair added. But that doesn't mean the system is perfect. Last year, nine nuclear officers were relieved for "creating a culture that enabled" widespread cheating on proficiency tests, The Washington Post reported, after an Air Force investigation that implicated dozens of airmen in cheating and illicit drug use.

"We do have some systemic issues in our missile community," Air Force secretary Deborah Lee James said at the time, calling the scandal a "major failure in integrity."

An accident like the one Bordne contends occurred is much less likely to occur now, Blair said, "But every time we undertake some investigation in the command and control system, we discover serious deficiencies and vulnerabilities. You never get to the bottom of it, and there is no doubt in my mind that some severe deficiencies exist that could result in the inadvertent or accidental launch of nuclear weapons."

By appearing in front of the UN, Bordne and Blair's goal is to convince nuclear powers such as the US and Russia to stand down from their state of hair-trigger nuclear readiness, and to pressure newer nuclear states such as India and Pakistan—whom Blair says are where the US was in the 1950s when it comes to handling their nukes—to impose tighter controls.

Hopefully, Bordne's harrowing tale, still not officially confirmed, will be a lesson that prevents history from repeating itself.