It's time for the anniversary of the nuclear bombings again.
The following scenes begin at the intersection of two bridges, which meet at a right angle. This was the T-Bridge, in Hiroshima, that was designated as the visual aiming point for the first nuclear bomb to be used in warfare, because it was visible from high altitude.
The bomb was dropped by parachute, and detonated at an altitude of about 800 meters. it detonated over a point that was to the southeast of the T-Bridge. The famous domed building that survived the blast, and remains as a memorial, remained standing because it was almost directly under where the bomb exploded. Hiroshima Castle is also nearby, it was destroyed by the blast but later rebuilt.
There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow, ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.
Have you ever heard of Kokura? If you haven't, it's because it was never bombed. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, an attempt was made to drop another nuclear bomb on Kokura. But visibility was poor, and it was essential that the bomb be dropped in just the right place. According to one story, factory workers in Kokura saw the plane, and burned a lot of coal tar, which produced thick smoke. The plane turned instead to it's alternate target, which was Nagasaki.
Kokura was then supposed to be the target of the third nuclear bomb, but the war ended before it was ready.
"THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD"
There is a former Soviet military officer who is referred to as "The Man Who Saved The World", but it doesn't have any messianic connotations. In 1983, the Soviet Union had a system of satellites that were keeping watch over the U.S. for hostile missile launches. One day, several missiles were detected as having been launched toward the Soviet Union.
It was a tense time, not long after the Soviet Air Force had shot down a South Korean passenger jet that had apparently accidentally strayed into Soviet air space, killing all on board. Ronald Reagan had angrily referred to the Soviet Union as an "Evil Empire".
It fell to the Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, to make a very quick decision as to whether or not this was a false alarm. Reporting the event would begin the process of nuclear retaliation. He decided that it must be a false alarm. One story is that only a few "missiles" were detected, and if America was going to launch a sudden nuclear attack, it would certainly be with more than a few missiles.
It turned out that what the satellites had detected was sunlight reflecting off moving high clouds in the atmosphere.
THE "DEAD HAND" RADIO STATION
Have you ever heard of UVB-76? It is an object of fascination for people around the world, and is commonly referred to as "The Buzzer".
It is a shortwave radio station that has been broadcasting little but a continuous tone for more than forty years. There is usually no information at all in the signal, just a continuous tone. There is nothing secret about it, anyone can listen to it at 4.625 Mhz, but there is not much to listen to.
Very infrequently a few apparently nonsensical words are spoken, in Russian. According to one account, the tone once stopped, the Russian words for "farming specialist" were spoken, and then the tone continued.
But what is the purpose of this radio station? "The Buzzer" is the best-known such station, but there are several others like it. It couldn't be any kind of communication, because there is no information in the tone. With modern navigation technology, it would be of no use as any kind of navigational beacon.
Some have wondered if the occasional nonsensical words might be coded messages to secret agents. Remembering that the broadcasts from London to Nazi-occupied Europe often contained seemingly-nonsensical phrases. The one that leaders of the French Resistance were waiting for was the "Wound my heart with a monotonous langour", from a French song, which indicated that it was time for D-Day.
After the D-Day landings, the nonsensical phrases continued. This was to make the Nazis think that the landings in Normandy were just a diversion. The real landing was still to come at Calais, and the Nazis should keep the bulk of their forces there.
Of course, the nonsensical phrases could be to make listeners think that the purpose of the broadcast was to send messages to secret agents, in order to disguise whatever it's real purpose is.
What many have concluded is that this has to be a "Dead Hand" mechanism. The transmission points are located near cities and if the station ever stops broadcasting, meaning that the city and the station have been destroyed, it will trigger an automatic nuclear retaliation, even if no one is left alive.
Or could it be to make everyone think that it is such a "Dead Hand" mechanism, to initiate an automatic nuclear retaliation, in order to discourage a nuclear attack?
THE SUBMARINES OF 1968
The loss of a submarine in peacetime is exceedingly rare. The only four examples that come to mind are the U.S.S. Thresher, which sank while diving in 1963, the Russian Kursk in 2000, the Argentine San Juan in 2017, and an Indonesian submarine in 2021.
When the Kursk sank, in Russia's Arctic waters, seismographs detected two explosions. There was a smaller explosion and then, about two minutes later, a larger explosion. The conclusion was that the explosion of a torpedo on board caused the ship to sink, and then the rest exploded when it hit the bottom.
So, how can it be that four submarines were lost, in early 1968, at a rate of nearly one per month?
1968 began with a Cold War naval incident, the seizing of a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, by North Korea. We visited the ship during our visit to "Pyongyang".
Around the same time as the Pueblo incident, a former British submarine being delivered to Israel, the Dakar, vanished in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The year before, Israel had fought the Six-Day War against neighboring Arab nations, including Egypt and Syria.
At around this same time, January 1968, and also in the Mediterranean, a French submarine, the Minerve, disappeared and only recently has been found. It is interesting that France had earlier been the paramount supporter of Israel. The late Israeli prime minister, and all-around politician, Shimon Peres, although remembered primarily as a peacemaker, had been the one to procure French nuclear technology for Israel. Charles DeGaulle reportedly supported Israel, but didn't want it to have nuclear weapons. Peres managed to get the technology anyway.
This is Israel's nuclear research center, in the Negev Desert.
Barely a month later, on March 8, the Soviet submarine K-129 disappeared on the other side of the world, northwest of Hawaii. The U.S., in a very secret and expensive operation, would have a ship especially built to recover the submarine, which was in extremely deep water. Part of the submarine was recovered. The Soviets apparently never made an effort at recovery.
Finally, on May 22, the U.S.S. Scorpion was monitoring the activity of Soviet submarines when it also disappeared. No official explanation was given of what happened, but the wreckage of the ship was found to be scattered over a wide area on the seafloor. This is an indication that something catastrophic happened, and the submarine did not sink in one piece.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Did the Cold War turn hot, starting with the Middle East and then drawing in the superpowers, but the action was limited to beneath the sea, until cooler heads prevailed and it was kept quiet?
THE FUNERAL OF HO CHI MINH
The Cold War was multi-faceted. Communist theory was open to interpretation and this caused tension and division between Communist countries. Josef Stalin was seen as the victor in the Second World War and had support among hard-liners across the Communist domain. His successor, the more moderate Nikita Khrushchev, shocked the world by denouncing Stalin and beginning the process of "De-Stalinization". This was the root of strict Communists in other countries being opposed to the relative moderation of the Soviet Union.
Aside from doctrine, Communist countries differed on how much they were willing to submit to the leadership of the Soviet Union. There were three times that the Soviets intervened militarily in Eastern Europe, in East Germany, in Hungary and, in Czechoslovakia. But that was to protect Communism. There were also countries, Yugoslavia, Romania and, Albania, that were dedicated to Communism but declined to submit to Soviet leadership.
Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin led to what was known as the Sino-Soviet Split. This was between the Soviet Union and China, both Communist countries. In 1969 there were months of border clashes between the two countries along the Ussuri River, which formed part of the border between the two countries in the Far East.
Ho Chi Minh had been President of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. North Vietnam was a Communist country that was on good terms with both the Soviet Union and China. In September 1969 Ho Chi Minh died. The foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and China just happened to meet at his funeral. That led to better relations between the two countries and an end to the border clashes.
When history repeats itself it is sometimes religious history repeating in secular form. Moscow became an important city as the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church. This church resulted from the first great split in the Catholic Church, in 1054 the pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople split and the Eastern Orthodox Church began. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, and separating from the harsh Communism that he was about, is a modern, secular mirror image of the Patriarch of Constantinople denouncing the pope, and separating from what his church was about.
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