On this day in 1995, Moscow comes frighteningly close to ordering a nuclear strike on the United States after mistaking a Norwegian research rocket for an American submarine-launched ballistic missile.

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  3. The Norwegian rocket incident, also known as the Black Brant scare, occurred on 25 January 25, 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 Svalbard, and flew on a high northbound trajectory, which included an air corridor that stretches from Minuteman III nuclear missile silos in North Dakota all the way to Moscow, the capital city of Russia.

    The rocket eventually reached an altitude of 1,453 kilometers, resembling a US Navy submarine-launched Trident missile.

    Fearing a high-altitude nuclear attack that could blind Russian radar, Russian nuclear forces went on high alert, and the “nuclear briefcase” (the so called *Cheget*) was brought to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who then had to decide whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States.

    Russian observers determined that there was no nuclear attack. No retaliation was ordered.

  4. Its great to see this day increasingly recognised, we need to pay more attention to events like this. I feel we’re starting to forget how fragile the world is next to our current technology, while the fear-mongering over nukes in the 70s and 80s was overblown the current state is a swing too far in the other direction, making the likelihood of an accident much higher.

  5. Launching something without previous warning, that can have resemblance to nuclear attack, near nuclear power that can annihilate whole world multiple times?

    Not a good idea. I hope how today anyone with this sort of experiments give USA and Russia governments a memo

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