The day Nixon wanted to blow up the world

"For two weeks in October 1969, the Nixon Administration secretly placed U.S. nuclear forces on alert.  [...] Still today, no conclusive explanation for the potentially destabilizing alert can be found. 

“There are two main after-the-fact explanations: first, that nuclear brinkmanship was designed to convince the Soviets that President Nixon was prepared to launch a nuclear attack against North Vietnam in order to convince Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate an end to the war in Southeast Asia” along the lines that previous historians have suggested.

The second proposed explanation is “that the President ordered the alert as a signal to deter a possible Soviet nuclear strike against China during the escalating Sino-Soviet border dispute.”  Consistent with the second interpretation, the FRUS volume provides new documentation of intelligence reports indicating that Soviet leaders were considering a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities.

Astonishingly, even the most senior U.S. military leaders were kept in the dark by the White House about the nature of the alert– before, during and after the event."

More: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2011/10/1969_nuclear_alert.html

Soviet SuperSpy comes out of the cold, posthumously

Nikolay Kuznetsov, the legendary Soviet spy who infiltrated the Wehrmacht, has been commemorated with a museum exhibit:

"An exhibition, dedicated to the 100th birth anniversary of legendary Soviet intelligence agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, opened in the Russian Urals city of Yekaterinburg on Thursday."

Who was Kuznetsov?

"According to Kuznetsov’s Soviet biographers, 'in March 1938 he began carrying out special assignments in the sphere of state security.' All old publications summarize this man’s biography in just a few lines. ...

Kuznetsov set foot on Ukrainian soil in August 1942. He did so in a very rare capacity, doubling as an intelligence agent and a partisan. Biographers wrote that “he landed behind enemy lines outside Rivne, where he joined a special partisan unit ‘Pobediteli’ (controlled by the NKVD) ...

Kuznetsov (known as Nikolai Grachov to his brothers-in-arms in the “Pobediteli” unit and, to the Nazi occupation government in Rivne — as Ober-Lieutenant Paul Wilhelm Sieber, was disguised as “an extraordinary commissioner of the economic command for the use of material resources of the Eastern territories in the interests of the Wehrmacht”)

For the Soviet command he secured such valuable intelligence as the location of Hitler’s field headquarters outside Vinnytsia (December 1942) and plans by the Nazi command to launch a massive offensive at Kursk (Operation Citadel, late May 1943). “Oberleutenant Siebert” eliminated the following ranking functionaries in the Nazi occupation administration: Imperial Financial Advisor with ministerial status General Gell (September 1943); General von Ilgen, Chief Justice of the Supreme German Court in Ukraine; General Alfred Funk (November 1943); Vice-Governor of Galicia Otton Bauer; and the head of his chancellery Heinrich Schneider (Lviv, February 1944). “Siebert” wounded General Paul Dargel, Deputy Imperial Commissioner of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, who was also the right-hand man of the Nazi satrap of Ukraine — Erich Koch. On May 31, 1943, Kuznetsov secured a personal audience with Koch himself, intending to assassinate him, but his plans failed, owing to the fact that Koch was extremely well guarded."

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Stalin was poisoned

From Axis:

Stalin most likely has been poisoned by poison, sipped in a bottle of mineral water or smeared inside the glass used by the Soviet leader, the paper says. The chief of laboratory of poisons for secret murders, Grigory Mairanovsky, arrested right after Stalin’s death, in his letters to the KGB chief Beriya repented that substances prepared by him had appeared not so strong as he had advertised.

SOURCE

1983 Apocalypse averted

six weeks in September and October were the most dangerous the world has ever experienced.  A false nuclear strike alert on September 26, 1983 was caused by nothing more than high-altitude clouds that had been picked up by a satellite's sensors and interpreted as missiles in flight. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, may have prevented all out nuclear war between the US and the USSR, the paper marks. Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait and the warning lights went off.

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