Ben Wyatt

Anybody that can name the heading reference wins my sympathy.

So casually browsing Pajamas Media and following some links led to this: 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War. My personal favorite:

At around midnight on October 25, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at it, and activated the "sabotage alarm." This automatically set off sabotage alarms at all bases in the area. At Volk Field, Wisconsin, the alarm was wrongly wired, and the Klaxon sounded which ordered nuclear armed F-106A interceptors to take off. The pilots knew there would be no practice alert drills while DEFCON 3 was in force, and they believed World War III had started.

Immediate communication with Duluth showed there was an error. By this time aircraft were starting down the runway. A car raced from command center and successfully signaled the aircraft to stop. The original intruder was a bear.

Not among the top 20 is a much more harrowing account of a 1983 computer glitch that told the Soviet equivilent of NORAD that US ICBMs were on their way. A Lt. Col. decided under duress and at the risk of losing Soviet nuclear deterrent that it was probably a glitch. He prevented WWIII from going hot, but was dismissed because he was no longer politically reliable.

This is a subject that I rarely dwell upon, given a relatively positive view of MAD doctrine (living in Germany during the Cold War does that). However, given that the top 20 were mostly NATO near-misses, and it's probable that the Soviet system was more prone to err, I will suggest that is only by the grace of God that we are alive. Then again, we already knew that.

Posted by Ben Wyatt at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As much as the internet is full of things that could be delicately called a waste of bandwidth that could easily eat up all of my time, I have found myself simply ending up at the same sites constantly, and wasting my time there. One of these sites is The Weekly Standard, which at the best of times could be described as a neo-con arm of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, meaning I may recommend the occasional article (not all of them) every so often. In the wake of the inaugural address, I'm suggesting this one, in which the author dissects this paragraph from the end of the address:

"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner of 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty."

As much as I didn't like select parts of the speech at times, the Bushites and their cabal of oil-bleeding fascist rich uncompassionate intolerant evil chickenhawk no-goodniks have hit on something key, all of which can be summed up in the last bit of that paragraph, the notion of an Author of Liberty. This is a pretty obvious pen-name for God.

Continue reading "The Author of Liberty?!" »

Posted by Ben Wyatt at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)