Introduction The Norwegian rocket incident, also known as the Black Brant scare, occurred on 25 January 1995 when a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from the Andøya Rocket Range off the northwestern coast of Norway. The rocket carried scientific equipment to study the aurora borealis over… Read More
Introduction On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear early warning system Oko reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces… Read More
Introduction Nuclear peace is a theory of international relations which argues that the presence of nuclear weapons may in some circumstances decrease the risk of crisis escalation, since parties will seek to avoid situations that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Proponents of nuclear peace theory therefore believe that controlled nuclear proliferation may… Read More
Introduction The Samson Option (Hebrew: ברירת שמשון, b’rerat shimshon) is the name that some military analysts and authors have given to Israel’s deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort” against a country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel. Commentators also have employed the term to refer to… Read More
Introduction Dead Hand (Russian: Система «Периметр», Sistema “Perimetr”, lit. “Perimeter” System, with the GRAU Index 15E601, Cyrillic: 15Э601), also known as Perimeter, is a Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons-control system (similar in concept to the American AN/DRC-8 Emergency Rocket Communications System) that was constructed by the Soviet Union. The system remains in use in the… Read More
Introduction The letters of last resort are four identically-worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom (UK) to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines. Refer to Operation Looking Glass, Dead Hand, and the Samson Option. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike… Read More
Introduction Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike (see below) capabilities would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of… Read More
Boot Camp & Military Fitness Institute 