Revealed: US Almost Launched Nuclear Weapons During Cuban Missile Crisis

"During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an Air Force airman says that his unit was ordered to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. His captain’s use of common sense over 50 years ago may have saved the world from a nuclear apocalypse.

An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists paints a picture of John Bordne, an Air Force airman who was stationed at one of four secret US missile sites in Japan during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the US Air Force has not come out and verified the claims, Bordne’s account is that, in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962, his unit of 32 Mace B cruise missiles inexplicably received launch orders.

Each Mace B cruise missile had an enormous payload 70 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bordne says that a few hours before his shift began, the commander at the Missile Operations Center on Okinawa began a routine radio transmission to the missile sites, giving a string of characters that normally did not match the ones that the crews had. But this time was different: For the first time in history, the codes matched.

The fate of the entire world hung in the balance when US Air Force Captain William Bassett had clearance to open his pouch to see if his personal string of characters matched the last part of the code that was transmitted. They did. This authorized him to open an envelope to read his site’s launch instructions, but the captain declined to fulfill the order of launching a nuclear strike.

The crew, with their fingers on the button, were ready to launch the nukes, but Bassett stalled them, as Bordne recalls, and ordered two armed airmen to “shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.”

“If this is a screw up and we do not launch, we get no recognition, and this never happened,” Bordne recalled the captain saying."

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