Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesMonday, November 9
From the desk
Start with 1979: NORAD's computers showed what looked like a massive Soviet nuclear strike, and the cause was a technician who loaded a test tape without switching the system to "test." Officials checked satellite data and early-warning radars, found no attack, and cancelled the alert. Worth a longer look is 1862, when McClellan rode to a Virginia farm to say farewell and Lincoln's choice, Burnside, took the Army of the Potomac. If you have a minute, Apollo 4 in 1967 flew the first Saturn V with every stage live and nobody aboard.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1979Featured · This day in history
NORAD screens show a massive Soviet strike; satellite and radar checks find no attack
On November 9, 1979, NORAD's computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center at Fort Ritchie, Maryland, showed what looked like a massive Soviet nuclear strike. A technician had loaded a test tape without switching the system status to "test," and the false warnings spread to two continuity of government bunkers and to command posts worldwide. Officials reviewed the raw data from satellites and checked the early-warning radars. Neither showed an attack, and the alert was cancelled.
The scare showed that a drill could be mistaken for a real attack. It led to improved procedures against false alarms and fed a growing awareness of nuclear miscalculation, and with it a worry about how much to trust machines.
Did you know
QWhy was a false alarm at NORAD never purely an American problem?
NORAD was set up on September 12, 1957, as a bi-national mutual defense organization between Canada and the United States, so the system that misfired in 1979 belonged to two countries. Its structure reflected that: it was divided into three regions, the Alaskan region, the Canadian region, and the American Continental region. The radars and computers served both nations. The error of a single technician was therefore an error inside a shared Canadian and American machine.
QHow many more times did the warning machinery misfire within the next year?
Twice more, in June 1980. On June 3, 1980, and again on June 6, 1980, a computer communications device failure caused warning messages to flash sporadically in U.S. Air Force command posts around the world, announcing that a nuclear attack was taking place. The cause was different from the November incident: broken hardware this time, not a test tape left in the wrong mode. Three failures of the same warning system fell in a span of under a year, and each one reached command posts far from NORAD itself.
QHow was NORAD's territory divided, and which regions made up the command?
NORAD was organized into three regions: the Alaskan region, the Canadian region, and the American Continental region. The split reflected the bi-national character of the command, with Canada holding a region of its own beside two covering U.S. territory. The false warnings of November 9, 1979, still reached beyond all of them. The false warnings of November 9, 1979, reached two continuity of government bunkers and command posts worldwide.
The Daily Record · free by email
Tomorrow's edition in your inbox — one story, one quote, the flag.
1967innovation
The first Saturn V leaves Florida with no crew aboard; the shock rattles the control center ceiling
Apollo 4 lifted off from Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center at 7:00 am EST on November 9, 1967, the first flight of the Saturn V and the first major test since the Apollo 1 fire killed its crew in January. Nobody was aboard. It was an "all-up" test, meaning every rocket stage and the spacecraft were live on the maiden flight. The launch had slipped from November 7 over worries about leaks in the liquid oxygen tanks, and the capsule splashed down in the Pacific slightly less than nine hours later.
Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, FloridaStory page →
The American Throughline
The Saturn V was the machine that had to carry Americans to the Moon and home again before the 1960s ended, and until this morning it had never flown. Apollo 4 gave NASA its first real flight data on the rocket, and the schedule, shaken by the Apollo 1 fire, moved forward.
Did you know
QWhy did NASA aim the spacecraft's lowest point 84.6 kilometers below the surface of the Earth?
After two orbits, the S-IVB fired again and pushed the spacecraft into an elliptical path with an apogee of 17,218 kilometers (9,297 nautical miles). The perigee, the lowest point of that path, was deliberately set at 84.6 kilometers (45.7 nautical miles) below the Earth's surface. No spacecraft could complete that orbit, by design: the trajectory guaranteed the capsule would plunge into the atmosphere on the way down. The steep, fast return let engineers test the command module's heat shield at simulated lunar-return velocity and angle, the conditions a crew coming home from the Moon would face. The orbit was designed to end in a re-entry.
QHow many errors did the post-fire inspections turn up in the Apollo spacecraft?
The inspections ordered after the Apollo 1 fire turned up 1,407 errors in the spacecraft. That number goes a long way toward explaining why the schedule slid for the better part of a year. The capsule that finally flew on Apollo 4 was not the final crew design. It was a Block I command and service module, modified to test several key Block II revisions, among them the heat shield. In other words, the flight tested the new design's most important changes on top of the older airframe, while the rocket beneath it was making its own debut.
QHow close did the capsule come to its aim point in the Pacific?
Very close. The command module landed approximately 8.6 nautical miles (16 kilometers) from the target site, northwest of Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean. That came at the end of a trip that started with the first S-IC first stage and S-II second stage ever flown on a Saturn V, and included the S-IVB's first in-flight restart. The data the flight returned covered the Saturn V and spacecraft structural integrity, subsystem operations, and the performance of the heat shield. Nearly nine hours after leaving Florida, the hardware was floating a short distance from where planners wanted it.
1862military
McClellan says farewell to his troops; Burnside takes the Army of the Potomac
Abraham Lincoln had run out of patience with George B. McClellan, who was too cautious for the President's taste and had failed to pursue Robert E. Lee after Antietam. On November 9, 1862, McClellan rode out to the farm of Julia Claggett in New Baltimore, Virginia, to bid his troops farewell. In front of the Claggetts' house, the Army of the Potomac passed to Ambrose Burnside, whom Lincoln had chosen two days earlier. Burnside's first great test came on December 13.
Lincoln's removal of McClellan was a plain exercise of civilian control over the army, carried out in the middle of a war. Burnside was followed by Joseph Hooker as Lincoln kept looking for a general willing to fight Lee.
Did you know
QWhat did Burnside write after being summoned to see Lincoln and Grant in December 1864?
Burnside wrote that he had not been told what he was meant to do. After the Battle of the Crater, he met with Lincoln and Grant to discuss his future in the Army, and afterward he wrote: "I was not informed of any duty upon which I am to be placed." The line comes two years after he took over the Army of the Potomac at New Baltimore, and it shows how far his standing had fallen by then. The man Lincoln once picked to lead the Union's largest eastern army left the meeting with no duty assigned.
QWhat did Lincoln do with Burnside after Fredericksburg and the Mud March, when Burnside might have been dismissed?
Lincoln offered him a way out and he did not take it. After replacing Burnside with Joseph Hooker on January 26, 1863, Burnside offered to resign his commission altogether, but Lincoln declined, saying there could still be a place for him in the army. He was transferred to command the Department of the Ohio instead. There he faced a different set of problems from those in Virginia: antiwar sentiment among civilians in the region and Confederate raiders. It was a quieter post than the Army of the Potomac, but it kept him in uniform and in the war.
QWho left a firsthand account of the change of command at the Claggett farm?
Columbia Claggett, the daughter-in-law of farm owner Julia Claggett, gave an account of the day after the war. She described the parade and the transfer of the Army to Burnside, which took place in front of the family's house. Her account matters because the ceremony happened on private farmland in New Baltimore, not in a camp headquarters or a government building. The family lived there, and the generals and soldiers were passing through their property. A civilian household watched one of the war's best-known command changes from its own front yard.
$17.76 your first year · then $39.99/yr · cancel anytime
Quote of the day
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
Dorothy Day
“Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.”
Bill Clinton
“The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable compact in civil society”
