Difference between revisions of "Timeline of nuclear risk"

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| 2008 || || || "When smuggling goods, illicit nonstate actors face a trade-off between the security and efficiency of the route (Hastings 2008)."<ref name="Stulberg"/> ||
 
| 2008 || || || "When smuggling goods, illicit nonstate actors face a trade-off between the security and efficiency of the route (Hastings 2008)."<ref name="Stulberg"/> ||
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| 2009 || || || "or example, in 2009 the United States and South Africa signed an agreement on cooperation on nuclear energy research and development related to PBMR and Generation IV technologies that did not include a conditionality clause."<ref name="Stulberg"/> ||
 
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| 2016 || March 18 – June 15 || || "19 airmen from the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base are under investigation for illegal drug use. The base operates 150 nuclear missiles, and the airmen who are being charged were responsible for ensuring the security of the weapons." ||
 
| 2016 || March 18 – June 15 || || "19 airmen from the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base are under investigation for illegal drug use. The base operates 150 nuclear missiles, and the airmen who are being charged were responsible for ensuring the security of the weapons." ||

Revision as of 18:10, 6 August 2022

This is a timeline of FIXME.

Sample questions

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:

Big picture

Time period Development summary More details
2000s "many countries began expressing a newfound interest in nuclear energy during the early 2000s."[1]

Full timeline

Year Month and date Event type Details
1956 November 5 False Alarms during the Suez Crisis.
1959 "The World Bank has long had a policy of not loaning funds for new nu�clear power plant construction. The last nuclear project it financed was a re�actor in Italy in 1959. The Bank adopted a more official policy proscription against loans for nuclear plants in 1996, though the it has supported mod�ernization of existing nuclear plants and supporting orders to advance the decommissioning of facilities and improve safety."[1]
1960 ". Israel has two nuclear reactors that are theo�retically utilized for research purposes only. The first went on line in 1960 and the second in 1962, meaning that both were producing nuclear energy prior to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons—whether that is coded as 1966, 1967, or 1973 (depending on the source)"[1]
1960 October 5 A radar alert from Thule, Greenland is sent to NORAD, announcing the detection of dozens of Soviet missiles launched for the United States.
1961 January 24 H-bombs Dropped on North Carolina.
1961 November 24 "On this evening, communication links between Strategic Air Command headquarters (SAC HQ) and NORAD went dead. The result was that SAC HQ lost communication with three Ballistic Missile Early Warning Sites (BMEWS) around the world, all of which were supposed to run on independent telephone and telegraph lines."
1962 August 23 "US Bomber in Soviet No-Fly Zone"
1962 October 24 "Soviet Satellite Explodes During Cuban Missile Crisis"
1962 October 25 "Bear Triggers Nuclear Alarm"
1962 October 26 "US F102A Fighters vs Soviet MIG interceptors"
1962 October 26 "Unannounced ICBM Launch during Cuban Missile Crisis A Titan-II ICBM was launched from Florida into the South Pacific. But no one alerted the Moorestown Radar site."
1962 October 26 "Easy-access Codes. With nuclear foreces on high alert because the Cuban Missile Crisis was escalating, work was accelerated at the Malmstrom Air Force Base to prepare the Minuteman-1 missiles for full deployment. In the rush, proper handover procedures and safety checks were skipped. The result was that one of the silos and missiles were ready to go with no armed guards to cover their transport to separate storage. All of the launch equipment and codes were placed together in the silo, which would have allowed a single operator to launch a fully armed missile."
1962 October 27 "October 27, 1962 Soviet Sub Captain Decides to Fire Nuclear Torpedo During Cuban Missile Crisis. This may be the closest call of all. eleven US Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had cornered the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba, in International waters outside the US “quarantine” area. What they didn’t know was that the temperature onboard had risen past 45ºC (113ºF) as the submarine’s batteries were running out and the air-conditioning had stopped. On the verge of carbon dioxide poisoning, many crew members fainted. The crew had had no contact with Moscow for days and didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Then the Americans started dropping small depth charges at them which, unbeknownst to the crew, they’d informed Moscow were merely meant to force them to surface and leave."
1962 October 27 "U2 Spy Plane Shot Down Over Cuba"
1962 October 28 "The newly operational Laredo warning site notified NORAD that they had identified two missiles over Georgia."
1962 October 28 "At nearly 9:00 AM, NORAD received news from Moorestown, NJ that a nuclear strike was expected to hit Tampa, FL at 9:02."
1965 November 9 "Power Failure Mistaken for Nuclear Blasts"
1967 May 23 "Confusing Solar Flares and Nuclear Attacks"
1968 January 21 "Hydrogen Bomb Shatters in Greenland"
1973 "The results for sensitive assis�tance increasing exploration are due entirely to three cases: Iran, Iraq, and Taiwan, which received assistance in 1984, 1976, and 1975"[1]
1973 October 24 "False Alarm During DEFCON 3. During the Arab-Israeli war, the U.S. went to high alert as a way of warning the U.S.S.R. not to intervene. "
1974 " Most sig�nificant, in 1974, India conducted a test of a nuclear explosive device using

technology it imported from Canada for “peaceful” purposes." "Nuclear tech�nology, materials, and know-how are dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be used for the production of electricity or nuclear weapons. India, for example, used nuclear materials supplied by the United States and a reactor provided by Canada to produce plutonium for a nuclear explosive that was tested in 1974; this early civilian nuclear assistance was the foundation upon which New Delhi built its nuclear program in the 1990s."[1] ||

1974 August 1 “In his last weeks in office during the Watergate crisis, President Richard M. Nixon was clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily. U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to route “any emergency order coming from the president”—such as a nuclear launch order— through him first (Schlosser 2013, p. 360).”
1975 "The results for sensitive assis�tance increasing exploration are due entirely to three cases: Iran, Iraq, and Taiwan, which received assistance in 1984, 1976, and 1975"[1]
1979 "In 1979, at the peak of the nuclear power sector’s growth, 233 power reactors were simultaneously under construction. By 1987, that number had fallen to 120."[1]
1980 March 15 "“The Soviet Union launched four submarine-based missiles from near the Kuril Islands as part of a training exercise. Based on data from a U.S. early warning sensor, one of the launches appeared to have a trajectory aimed at the United States. This led the United States to convene officials for a threat assessment conference (Comptroller General of the United States 1981).”"
1980 September 18 — September 19 "Silo Explosion Kills Airman"
Early 1980s "Had the Germans not had such lax export controls, India could have been denied one or both—since India had to smuggle Chinese heavy water through a German source in the early 1980s and simply bought beryllium from a German com�pany in 1984 (Perkovich 1999: 242, 250, 271)."[1]
1981 "The bombing of the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 was widely viewed to be a stopgap measure, delaying but not preventing Iraqi nu�clear aspirations."[1]
1981 "Peaceful nuclear programs also could be a source of international conflict. Because nuclear technology can be used for both civilian and military pur�poses, uncertainty about a country’s intentions could raise the risk of preven�tive military action. This danger is best illustrated by Israel’s 1981 “bolt from the blue” bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor known as Osiraq. Iraq procured this civilian facility from France and placed it under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards designed to detect diversions of key materi�als to a military program. The Israelis, however, feared that Saddam Hussein intended to use this plant to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, and it chose to take military action to limit Iraq’s capacity to build the bomb. Israel took similar action in September 2007 when it destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria, although this facility was not under IAEA safe�guards and it is unclear whether its purpose was military or civilian."[1]
1982 South Africa develops and builds its first nuclear explosive device.[2] Its scientists —including the head of the nuclear weapons program— were trained by the United States as a result of government-backed programs.[1] South Africa
1983 September 26 "Soviet Union Detects Incoming Missiles. A Soviet early warning satellite showed that the United States had launched five land-based missiles at the Soviet Union."
1983 "Centrifuges are “self�disassembling” machines that require a number of high-precision parts and careful trial-and-error experiments in order to operate correctly. Those who adopted centrifuges have spent on average 19.6 years in the pool, with a single success (Pakistan). Gaseous diffusion is a much better choice; if the United States were in the pool, the average number of years in the pool would be 9.0, with two successes. Even this number is deceptively high, since Argentina announced its facility in 1983, although it is unclear at what level, if any, it worked at (Montgomery and Mount 2010)."
1983 November 2 — November 11 "Soviets Misinterpret US Nuclear War Games NATO conduced a massive command post exercise simulating a period of conflict escalation November 2-11 1983. This culminated with a simulation of the highest military alert status, DEFCON 1, and a coordinated nuclear attack against the Soviet Union."
1984 "Had the Germans not had such lax export controls, India could have been denied one or both—since India had to smuggle Chinese heavy water through a German source in the early 1980s and simply bought beryllium from a German com�pany in 1984 (Perkovich 1999: 242, 250, 271)."[1]
1984 "The results for sensitive assis�tance increasing exploration are due entirely to three cases: Iran, Iraq, and Taiwan, which received assistance in 1984, 1976, and 1975"[1]
1986 "The nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 had a devastating effect on nu�clear industries around the world. To account for the decline in demand for nuclear power following this disaster, a dichotomous variable, Chernobyl, is included and coded 1 if the year is after 1986 and coded 0 otherwise."[1]
Early 1990s ". According to Lyudmila Zaitse�va’s research, the early 1990s saw many nuclear smugglers apparently moving directly from the former Soviet Union to Western Europe by road or rail."[1]
1992 "the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, begun in 1992 and intended to de�commission weapons of mass destruction; improve the physical security and materials, protection, control, and accounting features of Russian and other former Soviet states’ nuclear facilities; and turn underemployed Russian nu�clear scientists toward productive ends, has consumed more than US$10 bil�lion and to date has only partially achieved its"[1]
1995 "While nuclear traffickers could in theory use tunnels underneath borders or move over water, through the mountains and jungle, in practice they often try to smuggle their goods through minor border checkpoints, as when in 1995 customs officials caught a man trying to smuggle HEU through a land checkpoint in Bulgaria (IAEA 2007). That is, smugglers use the roads (and therefore border checkpoints) that are built by governments to facilitate travel and therefore have to deal with the state directly, but they try to minimize the chance of being caught by crossing the border at points where state security measures might be lackadai�sical or officials might be more easily bribed."[1]
1996 "The World Bank has long had a policy of not loaning funds for new nu�clear power plant construction. The last nuclear project it financed was a re�actor in Italy in 1959. The Bank adopted a more official policy proscription against loans for nuclear plants in 1996, though the it has supported mod�ernization of existing nuclear plants and supporting orders to advance the decommissioning of facilities and improve safety."[1]
2001 September 11 "We now know, for example, that al Qaeda considered flying airplanes into nuclear facilities in the United States as part of the 9/11 attacks (Holt and Andrews 2007)."[1]
2007 "In 2007, members of the original group of nuclear winter scientists collectively performed a new comprehensive quantitative assessment utilizing the latest computer and climate models. They concluded that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could kill as many people as died in all of World War II and seriously disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, harming nearly everyone on Earth."[3]
2007 July "In July 2007, just before Russian President Vladimir Putin vacationed with American President George W. Bush at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Russia successfully tested a new submarine-based missile. The missile carries six nuclear warheads and can travel over 6000 miles, that is, it is designed to strike targets in the United States, including, almost certainly, targets in the very state of Maine Putin visited. For his part, President Bush’s administration adopted a nuclear posture that included plans to produce new types of weapons, begin development of a new generation of nuclear missiles, submarines and bombers, and to expand the US nuclear weapons complex so that it could produce thousands of new warheads on demand."[3]
2007 August 29 — August 30 “Six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Although there were multiple instances when the crew should have verified that the cruise missiles were not armed, no one followed required protocol to check for live weapons. The plane sat overnight on the tarmac at Minot, unguarded. It then flew 1,500 miles to a base in Louisiana where it sat unguarded for another nine hours until a maintenance crew there realized that the weapons were live. In total, there were 36 hours during which no one in the Air Force realized that six live nuclear weapons were missing (Schlosser 2013, p. 473). In response to the incident, retired Air Force General Eugene Habiger, commander of U.S. Strategic Command from 1996 to 1998, said, “I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing” (Warrick and Pincus 2007).”
2007 September "Peaceful nuclear programs also could be a source of international conflict. Because nuclear technology can be used for both civilian and military pur�poses, uncertainty about a country’s intentions could raise the risk of preven�tive military action. This danger is best illustrated by Israel’s 1981 “bolt from the blue” bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor known as Osiraq. Iraq procured this civilian facility from France and placed it under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards designed to detect diversions of key materi�als to a military program. The Israelis, however, feared that Saddam Hussein intended to use this plant to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, and it chose to take military action to limit Iraq’s capacity to build the bomb. Israel took similar action in September 2007 when it destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria, although this facility was not under IAEA safe�guards and it is unclear whether its purpose was military or civilian."[1]
2008 "When smuggling goods, illicit nonstate actors face a trade-off between the security and efficiency of the route (Hastings 2008)."[1]
2009 "or example, in 2009 the United States and South Africa signed an agreement on cooperation on nuclear energy research and development related to PBMR and Generation IV technologies that did not include a conditionality clause."[1]
2016 March 18 – June 15 "19 airmen from the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base are under investigation for illegal drug use. The base operates 150 nuclear missiles, and the airmen who are being charged were responsible for ensuring the security of the weapons."

Meta information on the timeline

How the timeline was built

Base literature

  • The Nuclear Renaissance and International Security, by Adam N. Stulberg and Matthew Fuhrmann.[1]

The initial version of the timeline was written by FIXME.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

Feedback and comments

Feedback for the timeline can be provided at the following places:

  • FIXME

What the timeline is still missing

Timeline update strategy

See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 Stulberg, Adam N.; Fuhrmann, Matthew (23 January 2013). The Nuclear Renaissance and International Security. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-8530-3. 
  2. ↑ "South Africa: from nuclear armed state to disarmament hero". ICAN. Retrieved 7 August 2022. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Bostrom
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