Laura Kiniry in Smithsonian Magazine:
When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear war. But on January 25, 1995, that threat once again came front and center when Russian officers mistook a Norwegian rocket sent to study the aurora borealis for a weapon of mass destruction.
While not as well known as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the “Norwegian rocket incident” is considered one of the world’s closest brushes with nuclear war.
In the early morning hours of January 25, a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from Norway’s Andoya Rocket Range, a launch site off the country’s northwestern coast. Its purpose: to study the northern lights over Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
Although the scientists had notified dozens of countries, including Russia, in advance of their high-altitude scientific experiment, the information never made its way to Russia’s radar technicians.
More here.
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