Posted on 12/28/2015 2:52:26 PM PST by QT3.14
Two airmen were holding an Air Force nuclear missile crew at gunpoint deep in a top-secret bunker on Okinawa.
The crew had just been ordered to launch the island's missiles at targets in the Soviet Union and Asia, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching a harrowing climax in October 1962. But an Air Force launch officer was opposing the order.
The officer sent "two men over there with .45's and [they were] told to shoot anybody who tried to launch until the situation was resolved ... so those two men kept that whole crew at bay while we made a decision of what to do," said John Bordne, a nuclear missile mechanic for the Okinawa-based 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron who was on duty Oct. 28, 1962.
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
ping for clarity
Interesting story but something doesn’t add up here:
At least three other crews were manning the island’s other nuclear bunkers — each with four missiles — and they also had received the order to launch from Kadena Air Base, according to Bordne...
But the captain and the crew refused the order — and risked potentially being shot for treason — after seeing the target list, he said.
“We were told that we had to launch all the missiles but we only had one missile headed towards Russia, and we did not see why that we have to involve the other countries in a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States,” Bordne said in the video.
“The most glaring [error] is targeting info,” he said. “There is no way John Bordne would have known that targeting information.”
I don’t believe any of it. But if I believed it, the refuseniks should have been at least transferred out for refusing direct orders.
Vladivostok to name a potential target, would have been at extreme range for a Mace.
We should be REALLY sceptical of this guy’s claims. Just how would Airman Peon know where the missiles were targeted?
They needed Dabney Coleman and the W.O.P.R.
Color me skeptical.
The missile targets are not loaded or reviewed by the launch crew, from the best of my knowledge and available data. Rather, they are there to ‘pull the trigger’. If they got a launch command, the missle targets would have been pre-loaded from the command facility.
Story has a lot of holes.
The story sounds bogus. The Mace had a range of about 1200 nautical miles, which would put Vladivostok within its range, but not much else.
Part of a job I had for several years after I retired was to review all documents at the National Archives that had to deal with nukes. I spent years reading everything from junk administrative orders to some of the deepest stuff we had. This would have been in those documents.
This story is garbage. Being on launch crew for ten years and just reading how the crews and others reacted is enough to know this is a total fabrication but there is no documentation anywhere to back this up, and I read some pretty harrowing stuff.
Thanks, I thought you could clear this up.
Total BS. I think some of the scariest nuclear situations are purely accidental, and I’ve seen a couple of those.
Yes, some targets were pre-loaded but with tac nukes there had to be some flexibility. Even with those smaller missiles the launch crews were also the ones to run the "target tapes." Whether or not they knew where the targets were is another story that I cannot answer.
In my years in SAC (Minuteman III), officers and only officers managed the chain of events leading to a launch. That is from the national command authorities on down to the launch combat crews.
In our fellow Titan crews, enlisted members were involved in facility and air vehicle monitoring and preparation for launch in the Launch Control Center (LCC) but even there, two officers turned the keys to execute a launch.
And why didn't the three other crews launch?
IMHO, the motive for this man's fabrication is to make a few bucks off of his book.
Um, aren’t the two guys, and just the two guys, locked behind massive doors to protect from outside interference?
As a near contemporary of airman Bordne and also enlisted at that time, I can say that this is probably what we called a “war story”. Everyone knew they were mostly bs, but they were fun to relate and we always threw in our own little twist. These stories were never told on duty, but rather over a beer, especially if women were present!
Although I had a top secret clearance it was very limited as to what I was allowed to access. And even if he had a TS for his specific area of expertise, I doubt he was privy to the target list.
I call major BS!
The story is completely bogus. Enlisted airmen don’t turn keys, never did.
No onsite personnel, enlisted or officers, in the launch chain of command, have ever been aware of targeting.
Let’s get our oars in the water here. All these scenarios were well thought out before this is claimed to have happened.
Notice how the tops of the silos are flush at grade? In the case of an accidental or mutiny launch sequence, APC’s get parked on top.
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