Sure, everyone knows about the Cuban missile crisis, that terrifying month of October in 1962 when the world braced itself for nuclear annihilation.  But that wasn’t the only time the world almost came to blows with massive nuclear arms. There are dozens of instances that saw tensions rise and itchy trigger fingers hovering over large red buttons labeled “Launch.”  The thing is, you just don’t hear about them as much.

Here are a few examples…

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The Mysterious Figure

It was October 25th, 1962, the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and tensions around the country were high to say the very least. At an Air Force base in Duluth, Minnesota, a security guard spotted a mysterious figure attempting to climb over a far fence and get in to the base. The guard grabbed his gun and began to fire off rounds at the intruder, but none of them hit the mark.

When the intruder got away, the guard hit the base’s alarm, as was protocol. And here’s where the real problem starts. The guard did nothing wrong; he saw an intruder, tried to stop him, and then he notified everyone to be on alert. The problem was with the alarm he set off.

There was some kind of wiring screw up, so instead of the alarm telling everyone on nearby bases to be on high alert — which it did for most of the nearby bases — the alarm at the Volk Field air base in Wisconsin sounded off, ordering a fleet of F-106A interceptors to take flight. This wouldn’t normally be that big of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the interceptors were carrying a pay-load of nuclear bombs. Also, as I mentioned, that whole Cuban Missile Crisis thing was going on at the same time, so the pilots just assumed that the nuclear war with the Soviet Union was about to begin.
  
The pilots geared up, probably full of fear, and they hopped in to their cockpits – they were ready to fight a nuclear war. Then, a car blazed down the tarmac from the air traffic control tower, stopping the pilots from taking off. The man driving the car jumped out and told everyone to stop what they were doing because the intruder at the Duluth base had been identified.

It was a bear.

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What Could Have Been…

January 21st, 1968. The Cold War was in full swing as both sides were looking for a reason to attack the other. But, as most of these stories will tell you, it’s only through posturing, not through any actual attacks, that we nearly annihilated ourselves.

During the Cold War, the United States periodically ran alert missions known as “Chrome Dome” mission. These missions were designed to simulate the flight conditions a crew would experience in case they had to perform a nuclear drop. One such crew was flying over Greenland on during a routine Chrome Dome test run.

As they flew over Boffin Bay in Greenland, there was a mechanical malfunction in their B-52 bomber which resulted in a cabin fire. Six crew members ejected to safety, but one died in the resulting crash. But it wasn’t just a crash. When the bomber hit the ground, it exploded, as did the explosives surrounding the radioactive core of the hydrogen bombs the bomber was carrying.

Given the state of nuclear weapons at the time, the setting off of the explosives surrounding the radioactive core could have set off the second-stage fission reaction, which is to say a large part of Greenland wouldn’t be around today.

But, for some reason, the explosion didn’t kick start the 2nd stage. Instead, Greenland got stuck trying to clean up a massive radioactive mess.

But the most frightening thing about the entire incident isn’t so much the incident itself – it’s what could have happened afterward.

It’s theorized that if the bomb had gone off it would have triggered radiation detecting sensors over at NORAD. And, seeing as the explosions would have cut off communication between NORAD and the nearby early warning station, NORAD would have been left in the dark about the news of a B-52 bomber crash, and they would have interpreted this massive spike in radiation readings as a preemptive nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. This would have led to the United States firing their own bombs, which would have led to a lot of us not existing today.

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“000?”

With so much money being funneled in to military research and development during the Cold War, there was a bit of a technological boom. One such tech advancement was what would now be considered primitive electronic displays at both NORAD, SAC (Strategic Air Command), and the Pentagon. One display in specific was a large and very visible set of four numbers. These numbers gave an up-to-the-minute tabulation of the number of nuclear missiles currently in the air and on their way to a target. The numbers were always safely reading 0000, as in there were no nuclear missiles soaring through the air.

On June 3, 1980 at around 2:25 a.m., the nuclear missile counter changed. Instead of its normal 0000, it read as 0002. Seeing as this meant that there were 2 nuclear missiles that had been launched, flight crews carrying nuclear payloads were warmed up, Minutemen missile sites were primes and ready and airborne command posts were launched.

But it was all for not. It turns out that the shiny new machinery had simply and inexplicably substituted the number “0” with the number “2,” so there weren’t actually any nukes that had been launched. Knowing that it was just a false alarm, everyone calmed down.
But then, three days later, it happened again; the counter switched from 0 to 2 and the entire process was started up again – planes were warmed up, and missiles were aimed. Knowing that this same scenario played out just a few days prior, someone deiced to do some investigating in to just what was going on.

It turned out that the 0 to 2 switch over was pretty far from a nuclear launch. It was really just one faulty computer chip and some faulty wiring that produced those readings.

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A Series of Misunderstood Events

During yet another moment of high tension, in 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. This would eventually lead to a military attack on Egypt by France, Israel and Brittan. During this time, historically known as the Suez Crisis, NORAD received word that a massive Soviet attack was currently underway.

To NORAD, the proof was in the pudding because a series of events that all happened to be going on at the same time created the illusion of big military action.

First, it was a Soviet fleet moving away from the Black Sea and in to the Aegean, which was a far more aggressive military stance.

Secondly, a British bomber had just been shot down over Syria.

Thirdly, 100 Soviet MiGs were seen flying over Syria.

And lastly, a large fleet of unidentified aircraft was spotted flying over Turkey, which caused the Turkish air force to go on high alert.  

This bizarre confluence of events spelled out only one thing to the folks over at NORAD: It was time for war.

Well, it would have if each event didn’t have a very logical and simple, non-combative explanation.

First, the Soviet fleet moving from the Black Sea to the Aegean was a part of a routine, non-war exercise.

Second, the British bomber was not shot down, but rather, was having some mechanical problems and had to land to get them fixed.

Third, the MiGs were a part of an escort for the President of Syria.

And last, that large fleet of air craft over Turkey? Well, that was just a really, really big flock of Swans.

Location is one of the major trends online and, in a few years time, most services will include some sort of functionality based on location information. Ever the trend setter, Twitter has jumped on the bandwagon and has implemented a geolocation API for third-party services, meaning that users can choose to send their location with their tweets and it will show up in apps which support the feature. The API hasn’t been live for that long and already people are starting to do interesting things with it, like GeoMeme which pits two trends against each other to see what the local Twittersphere has to say about it.

“Visitors to GeoMeme choose a location on the map, and two search terms to compare. GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the bounds of the map, based on public data from a number of mobile twitter apps,” the site’s creator, Bob Hitching, writes.

Using the site is as easy as it gets. GeoMeme determines your current location and centers the map, powered by Google Maps, to where you are at the moment. You can then enter any two search terms and the site will count the number of mentions it gets in the tweets coming from the area you selected. Depending on how accurately the site can determine your location, the map starts out with just your neighborhoo… (read more)

Niall Ferguson is travelling from publication to publication, spreading his message of fear and the end of the US empire, unless we do something to get our debt in check.

This time he shows up in Newsweek, in an attempt to explain how fiscal calamity will mean the end of US military might.

You know the drill: Without growth and sound finances, our gigantic global military endeavors will come unglued, resulting in chaos.

Even here he’s taking shots at his rival Paul Krugman. This is in the context of whether there’s enough global demand for our debt to keep on spending like we ahve.

Could that happen? I doubt it. For one thing, the Chinese keep grumbling that they have far too many Treasuries already. For another, a significant dollar depreciation seems more probable, since the United States is in the lucky position of being able to borrow in its own currency, which it reserves the right to print in any quantity the Federal Reserve chooses.

Now, who said the following? “My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar.”

Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina’s (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has the economic situation really changed so drastically that now the same Krugman believes it was “deficits that saved us,” and wants to see an even larger deficit next year? Perhaps. But it might just be that the party in power has changed.

History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises. “On average,” write Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new book, This Time Is Different, “government debt rises by 86 percent during the three years following a banking crisis.” In the wake of these debt explosions, one of two things can happen: either a default, usually when the debt is in a foreign currency, or a bout of high inflation that catches the creditors out. The history of all the great European empires is replete with such episodes. Indeed, serial default and high inflation have tended to be the surest symptoms of imperial decline.

Stepping back, Ferguson argues we won’t be so lucky, so as to follow the Japanese model of a permanently high debt-to-GDP model. As he notes, over their multiple lost decades, the govrnment has been able to tap over-saving households and other institutions. But we’ve got no such luck. Everyone’s basically tapped except China and, well, it’s sad that that’s our only hope.

Read the whole thing at Newsweek >>

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See Also:

• Krugman: We’ll Never Get Back To Full Employment At This Rate
• Krugman: See, Other Countries Have Insane Debt, And End Up Just Fine
• Niall Ferguson: Roubini Is Okay, But He’s Not As Good As Me

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible…

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

Keep reading at the NYT >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• David Rosenberg: Okay, Fine, The Jobs Numbers Are Getting Better
• Watch The Country Get Fired: Unemployment By County 2007-2009
• 10%+ Unemployment Through 2015, Says Mish

(This guest post first appeared at The Oil Drum and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License)

In World Energy Outlook 2009, the International Energy Agency seems to have dropped a bombshell that has been quietly (and politely) ignored. In their main ‘reference scenario’, the IEA forecasts that OECD demand has already peaked – it never recovers the levels seen before the oil price spikes and financial crisis unfolded.

In recent editions of their World Energy Outlook, the IEA has been reducing their forecast for 2030 total oil supply. But forecasting a decline in OECD consumption is a radical shift.

Here at The Oil Drum we see peak oil occuring well before 2030, with production at that point significantly lower than it is now. However, even the IEA’s forecast of 105 mb/d allows for only anaemic growth for total supply of 1% per year. Since they still see strong demand growth from China and other developing nations, OECD takes the hit:

Oil demand is projected to grow by 1% per year on average, from 85 million barrels per day in 2008 to 105 mb/d in 2030. All the growth comes from non-OECD countries; OECD demand falls.

Unfortunately the IEA does not present this oil situation in a figure, however the one below for total primary energy demand gives us a good impression. China, India and the rest of the non-OECD world keep growing their consumption (IEA forecast, not mine!), while OECD is all but flatlining.

For oil, the situation is worse. OECD share of available oil is constrained so much that it declines. The details for primary oil demand alone are in Table 1.3. The peak for OECD demand was in the period 2000-2008 and declines by 0.3% per year to 2030.

Let me repeat that.. *THE IEA* says that OECD oil consumption is in decline, permanently.

It’s also significant that in their report they say Non-OPEC oil supply declines from 2010. So all those arguments about technology, increasing recovery, a new Middle East in the Arctic.. all amount to nothing at least in the entire Non-OPEC part of the world where all those clever western oil companies do their business.

All the peak oil analysis that you’ve read here still suggests that the IEA’s forecast is too optimistic, for both OPEC and Non-OPEC parts of the world. And the IEA whistleblower also claims that their forecasts are inflated. But a peak is still a peak, and the IEA now says that OECD oil demand is in decline and will not recover the levels prior to the financial crisis.

This seems to me like a dramatic statement for the IEA to make. This official forecast from the agency representing OECD nations, now conflicts with just about every one of its individual member’s own forecasts (and that of just about every private enterprise). To convince decision makers of the inevitable oil decline facing us, we no longer need to refer to the online analysis by peak oil bloggers. You can simply tell your president, chief, boss and your neighbour: The IEA says our oil consumption is going down, what are you going to do about it?

As a footnote, it appears that the IEA is in good company with their updated forecast. Stuart Staniford, now writing at Early Warning, has been exploring recent trends in oil consumption. He also finds that the strong developing economies and the oil exporting nations have a firm balance of trade basis on which to continue increasing their own oil consumption, albeit it at perhaps lower than recent rates, even as high prices and/or hard times hurt elsewhere. Even without a peak in oil supply, Stuart shows that OECD nations will start taking a big hit in oil consumption over the next few years. Any ‘real’ economic recovery (yet to be sighted) is going to hit a brick wall very quickly if we stick to the old ways of using and abusing oil.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• US Oil Production Explodes Higher At Fastest Rate Since 1970
• No, The Baltic Dry Index Doesn’t Forecast Oil Prices
• Sadly, CERA’s Optimism Over Oil Production Is Total Nonsense

Dynapac has a complete range of pneumatic tyred rollers. All have standard features offering high performance, simplicity and versatility. The CP142 has an exclusive Modular Ballast System comprising sealed ballast containers to allow exact visual control of wheel loads.

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Measuring only 3.5″, this ultra compact panel offers unparalleled display performance, with excellent visibility even when using small characters, high contrast, and superior brightness thanks to the high intensity LEDs.

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Everswitch announce the new Anti Vandal Reader that support iClass, Mifare and DESfire protocols. This new reader is joining the Anti Vandal Proximity Reader and the Anti vandal Keypad/Reader family of products. Like the entire Everswitch product the reader is IP68 waterproof rated and specially designed for extreme temperatures. Easy to install and replaceable for any exist reader.

There are many important aspects to consider in the process of designing complete air solutions, such as noise, vibration, ventilation and aesthetics, just to mention a few.

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Paolo Pellegrini, John Paulson’s famous sidekick who helped figure out the great housing bet, has released his first shareholder letter since striking out on his own. Not surprisingly, he’s doing awesome, with a 175% gain since inception. (via Zero Hedge)

And like many managers these days, he hates the dollar, and likes commodities.

All of the above recommends shorting US MBS and the US dollar – we can’t predict which will
go down, or which will go down more, but in combination we believe they will go down a lot.
Buying commodities and commodity-related currency is one way of shorting the US dollar. It is
highly probable that commodities outperform other asset classes in the medium term, as demand
from emerging markets bumps against still-constrained supply.

With China a lead actor in this play, investors like us must either divine Chinese policy or find a
strategy that is relatively invariant to it, at least over time. We attempt the latter. If China uses
dollars to buy US goods, US inflation goes up and MBS go down. If China uses dollars to buy
other currencies, MBS – in dollars – may not do as badly, but the US dollar will collapse.

The critical implementation issues, aside from the choice of instruments and trade execution, are
(1) the respective weights of the two legs of this strategy (short MBS, long commodities) and (2)
leverage/financing – we don’t want to be “stopped-out” of a winning trade on a temporary
reversal. Robust structuring of counterparty trading relationships and individual transactions
contributed significantly to our investment results in the past. High returns imply the possibility
of large temporary reversals, which dealers may exploit to curtail losing positions against poorly
prepared counterparties. We intend to be as diligent and creative as ever in ensuring that we
capture the full benefit of our investment insights through skillful implementation.

PSQR Investor Report September 2009

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• John Paulson Is A Great Trader Because He’s Grumpy And Negative
• Paulson & Co. Hedge Fund Loses Key Manager
• Jim Chanos: China Is Headed For A Huge Crash

	VIDEO: Wet Liberal rants about Top Gear, electric cars and hydrogen This is just good fun.		Mazda2 to be basis of electric vehicle test fleet eZoom-eZoom?
	Report: Revived Toyota MR2 hybrid could challenge Honda CR-Z We like this sort of fight.	Other news: High price for a hybrid: Lexus sets MSRP for LS 600h at $108,800 New Buick Excelle debuts in China, sedan coming to America soon Spy shots: Higher performance MINI diesels spotted testing

AutoblogGreen for 11.29.09 originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As if the newsflow from the last few days could get any more surreal, Dow Jones concludes the ticker with this stunner:

Japan Hirano: Expect BOJ Gov, PM To Discuss Quantitative Easing

TOKYO (Dow Jones)–Japan’s top government spokesman said he expects Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa to exchange opinions on the economy and to discuss the possibility of the central bank adopting a policy of quantitative easing, local media reported Monday.

The BOJ head and the prime minister will also talk about whether they share similar views on the economy, Nikkei News cited Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano as saying at a press conference earlier in the day.

Read the whole thing at Zero Hedge >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• With Dollar At 14-Year Low Against Yen, Japan Raises Hints Of Dramatic Intervention
• Japanese Yen On A Tear
• The Dollar Carry-Trade Denialists Are Wrong

As AOL nears its spin off from Time Warner, which will be in a little over a week now, it’s talking more and more about the future. So far, most plans haven’t really been all that groundbreaking and the company has been saying for a while now that it wants to become a content powerhouse reaching into any niche it believes could be profitable. Now CEO Tim Armstrong has detailed some more plans the company has in this segment and it’s a surprising turn for the company though, in hindsight, perhaps not a totally unexpected one. The CEO told the Wall Street Journal that it planned to develop a hybrid system for creating news and content, part machine part human, which would push out content on the topics most likely to be popular at that particular time.

The system is designed to create the content which will bring in the most readers, in turn generating the most advertising money. An algorithm will track breaking news stories and popular topics and will determine which subject is likely to generate the most revenue. It will then present these findings to the company’s editors, which are at about 500 at the moment, but AOL has been on a hiring spree in this front. Then, they will chose the ones they’ll push through to the next step, sending out article requests through a new web site it has set up to any f… (read more)

Gloomy investor Eric Sprott argues that banks remain extremely leveraged — especially Canadian banks! — and that with regulators now looking to make up for the bailout, it’s a particularly bad time to be investing in banks, a la John Paulson. (via PragCap)

Sprott—Don-t-bank-on-Banks –

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Even With Government Backstop, FDIC Unable To Dump Failed Banks
• Forget Meredith Whitney, Paulson Loves American Banks (CBY, BAC)
• Meredith Whitney: "I Haven’t Been This Bearish In A Year" (XLF)

Still believe in the v-shaped recovery idea that was so popular, oh, about 2 months ago?

Wake up. That ship has sailed says Goldman’s Jan Catzius, whose latest report argues that we’re settling into a sub-par recovery.

From housing to labor, there’s just precious little evidence of a vigorous rebound.

See the full argument >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• SocGen: Prepare Yourself For The Worst Case Scenario!
• Goldman: It’s 2004 All Over Again
• Five Reasons A Sell-Off Is Coming

It looks like Twitter may not be getting any paid accounts after all, at least not in the way we’ve been initially expecting, despite the detailed reports from last week. Digital Garage, the company which runs Twitter in Japan, has issued a statement which boils down to ‘it’s a misunderstanding, there won’t be any paid accounts for the foreseeable future’.

After the news of the paid premium content started making rounds, the company wanted to set the record straight denying it had any immediate plans. It was a couple of days after the initial reports and there are still a couple of sketchy details, but here’s what happened. Kenichi Sugi DG Mobile’s, a Digital Garage subsidiary, chief operating officer, gave a presentation at a tech conference where he laid out some of the details of the company’s plans to start using paid subscriptions as a revenue model. The presentation got picked up by various media outlets and spread around the world.

Now Digital Garage is saying that the presentation wasn’t an official announcement from the company, but rather some possible future plans for DG Mobile which don’t directly involve either Twitter or Digital Garage.

“In response to media reports stating that Twitter Japan will be launching a paid-premium accounts service on Tw… (read more)

(This guest post originally appeared at the author’s blog)

Strategists at Credit Suisse are currently expecting a near-term equity sell-off, but are not yet concerned about the downturn evolving into a larger bear market decline.  Why have they turned a bit more cautious?  A series of psychological, fundamental and technical events:

As we’ve previously noted, sentiment is turning extremely bullish:

(a) Bearish sentiment has hit June 2004 low (Figure 9).When it was this low in 2003 and 2004, markets corrected by 5% (Figure 10), but we would stress that bullish sentiment at that point was a lot higher then than it is now.

Credit spreads have begun to widen in the last few months.  Not surprisingly, investors are beginning to focus on the long-term debt problems around the globe.   In addition, Dubai and the upcoming wave of mortgage resets could prove a reminder that the credit crisis is not quite over yet.

(b) Stress in the credit markets. We have seen the sovereign CDS rise in the past three months especially in Japan (the world’s largest creditor!), whose CDS has doubled (rising from 35bps to 70bps) – a surprise, given that the trigger has been the DPJ tightening fiscal  policy by 1.2% of GDP. We have also seen the credit spreads of lower quality European countries deteriorate (Greece spreads have widened by 100bps over the past three months).

As we recently noted in the Expectation Ratio, it’s likely that the gap between real earnings and expectations has peaked.  Credit Suisse believes upgrades have likely peaked as well:

(c) The rate of earnings upgrades has just peaked, and on the last three occasions this happened (June 04, Sep 05 and May 06), the S&P 500 has traded sideways for a the next three months.

Credit Suisse is concerned that the ECB could begin pulling the liquidity plug:

(d) The ECB will start withdrawing part of the emergency liquidity – with the announced end of the unlimited one-year refinancing operations in December. Greece and Ireland are the main recipients of the funds from ECB refinancing operations, with these funds being equivalent to around 50% and 16% of GDP respectively, according to our European Economics Team.

Although the technicals remain firmly positive in the long-term, we are nearing a critical juncture in the rally.  In addition, the alarming volume trends are reason for CS to be concerned:

(e) Chartist point: 1,121 on the S&P 500 would mean a 50% retracement of the bear market. This point has not been breached. In the last month, volumes have been slightly higher on down-days than on up-days.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Goldman: Here’s How To Play The Big, End-Of-The-Year Surge
• Goldman: It’s 2004 All Over Again
• Why I Am An Optimist

Back in August, we noted that a Dutch court, at the urging of anti-piracy group BREIN (which has a history of questionable tactics), had ordered Mininova to remove all infringing links from its index. Even though the court admitted that Mininova itself was not infringing, it was told to remove any torrents that linked to infringing material. Since there’s simply no way to know whether the torrents link to infringing material, and tests of some filtering solutions proved to not do a very good job, the site has decided to remove all torrents other than those specifically approved by the site. End result? The entertainment industry may have wac’d another mole, as Mininova users simply scatter to other providers. But the industry hasn’t done anything to get people more interested in buying. How many more moles get wac’d before anyone figures this out?

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