10 THINGS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW

50 THINGS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW



INTRODUCTION
Certain parties don't want you to know certain facts. For example, if Bayer were proud that it
introduced heroin to the world, wouldn't that fact be on the company's Website? After all, it was
one of the most popular drugs of the twentieth century. The official corporate history mentions
the release of aspirin in 1899 but not heroin during the previous year.
Do you think the Catholic Church wants you to know that Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book?
True, the canonical Catholic Encyclopedia does mention the title in passing, but it demurely
neglects to say anything about it.
Historians don't seem too happy about the fact that Winston Churchill decried an alleged
worldwide Jewish conspiracy, so you won't read that very often. Likewise, the cannibalistic
tendencies of the Virginia colonists and our close call with World War III I are just too
discomforting to be widely admitted.
My lady-love was an active feminist in the 1970s, yet she had never heard that the founding
mothers of feminism opposed abortion. Small wonder, since their prolife views are almost never
mentioned in biographies or documentaries. I was surprised when Richard Metzger,
Disinformation's creative director, told me that Carl Sagan loved reefer. I guess the Drug
Warriors won't be using the famous scientist as a poster child for the "evils" of pot.
The tobacco companies finally had to cop to lung cancer, but they still prefer that you remain
ignorant of all the other health problems caused by smoking. You won't see "Causes blindness"
or "Doubles risk of genital cancer" on the warning label. The beef industry sued Oprah Winfrey
for discussing the possibility of mad cow disease in the US, so do you think that the dairy
industry will be very happy when people find out that most milk starts out containing bovine
leukemia virus?
Activists have been arrested for telling people about their full powers as jurors. Plans lo nuke the
Moon have been classified. The military successfully pressured a movie studio to change the
name of a character in the flick Black Hawk Down; that particular commando is currently in the
stockade for raping a child under twelve.
Certain parties don't want you to know certain facts. That's a fact.




01
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WE ALWAYS SEE AREN'T THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS
First Amendment battles continue to rage across the US over the posting of the Ten
Command-ments in public places — courthouses, schools, parks, and pretty much anywhere else
you can imagine. Christians argue that they're a part of our Western heritage that should be
displayed as ubiquitously as traffic signs. Congressman Bob Barr hilariously suggested that the
Columbine massacre wouldn't have happened if the Ten Commandments (also called the
Decalogue) had been posted in the high school, and some government officials have directly,
purposely disobeyed court rulings against the display of these ten directives supposedly handed
down from on high.
Too bad they're all talking about the wrong rules.
Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State
Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply
reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17.
You'll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing
or coveting, and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told
him on Mount Si'nai. These are not written down in any form.
Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two "tables of stone" with rules
written on them (Exodus 31:18). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he
sees the people worshipping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the
tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).
In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to "commandments." In the first instance, they are
"words" which "God spake," while the tablets contain "testimony." It is only when Moses goes
back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28). In an
interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the
ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses' memory is faulty or God
changed his mind.
Thus, without further ado, we present to you the real "Ten Commandments" as handed down by
the LORD unto Moses (and plainly listed in Exodus 34:13-28). We eagerly await all the new
Decalogues, which will undoubtedly contain this correct version:
I. Thou shalt worship no other god.
II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
III.. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep
IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering at the year's end.
VI. Thrice In the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.
VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.

VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.
X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother's milk.



02
ONE OF THE POPES WROTE AN EROTIC BOOK
Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and
rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn't
get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly
publication on literature claims that Historia "was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of
the whole Renaissance." The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: "The
Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German]
Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy]."
It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the
turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book
appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste
Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye
Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic
Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted
below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in
modern English.)
The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today's
standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres:
"When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was
embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and
wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was
refreshed." Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged,
then ate, then drank wine.
His Holiness describes the next time they hook up:
Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we
judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so
pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure....
Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he
saw such beauty as he had never seen before. "I have found more, I believe," said Euralius,
"than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or
more fair than these limbs?... O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it
you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my
arms?... O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I
am, or more blessed."...

He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren't weary. Like Athens,
who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.
But Euralius isn't just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres' cousin-in-law:
You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No
heart of flesh hasn't sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise
Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature
of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with
nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in
our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And
many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when
love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against
the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.
Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres' husband
borrows a horse from Euralius: "He says to himself, 'If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the
same thing to your wife.'"
Popes just don't write books like that anymore!



03
THE CIA COMMITS OVER 100,000 SERIOUS CRIMES EACH YEAR
It's no big secret that the Central Intelligence Agency breaks the law. But just how often its does
in is a shocker. A Congressional report reveals that the CIA's spooks "engage in highly illegal
activities" at least 100,000 times each year (which breaks down to hundreds of crimes every
day). Mind you, we aren't talking about run-of-the-mill illegal activities — these are "highly
illegal activities" that "break extremely serious laws."
In 1996, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a
huge report entitled "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century." Buried amid
hun-dreds of pages is a single, devastating paragraph:
The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed of
the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break
extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated
efforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred times
every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in
highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment
to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals
and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself.
Amazingly, there is no explanation, no follow-up. The report simply drops this bombshell and
moves on as blithely as if it had just printed a grocery list.

One of the world's foremost experts on the CIA — John Kelly, who uncovered this revelation —
notes that this is "the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes."
He goes on to say:
The report suggested that the CIA's crimes include murder and that "the targets of the CS
[Clandestine Service] are increasingly international and transnational and a global
presence is increasingly crucial to attack those targets." In other words, we are not talking
about simply stealing secrets. We are talking about the CIA committing crimes against
humanity with de facto impunity and con-gressional sanctioning.
Other government documents, including CIA reports, show that the CIA's crimes include
terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. The documents
also show that these crimes are part and parcel of deliberate CIA policy (the
[congressional] report notes that CIA personnel are "directed" to commit crimes).



04
THE FIRST CIA AGENT TO DIE IN THE LINE OF DUTY WAS DOUGLAS
MACKIERNAN
As of the year 2000, 69 CIA agents had died in the line of duty. Of these, the identities of 40
remain classified. Former Washington Post and Time reporter Ted Gup spent three years hacking
down information about these mysterious spooks who gave their lives for the Agency. (Mm
resulting publication, The Book of Honor, names almost all of them.)
The first to die was Douglas Mackiernan. Undercover as a State Department diplomat, the US
Army Air Corps Major worked in the capital of China's Xinjiang (Sinkiang) province, which
Gup says "was widely regarded as the most remote and desolate consulate on earth." He went
there m May 1947 to keep an eye on China's border with the Soviet Union and to monitor the
Husskies' atomic tests.
In late September 1949, during the Communist takeover of China, Mackiernan left, but it was too
late to use normal routes. Incredibly, he decided to go by foot during winter all the way to India,
which would take him across a desert and the Himalayas. He, three White Russians, and a
Fulbright scholar slogged the 1,000-mile trek in eight months. On April 29, 1950, they managed
lo reach the border of Tibet, but guards there thought the men were commies or bandits, and
opened fire on them.
Hitting the ground, the bedraggled travelers waved a white flag, which stopped the gunfire. They
slowly walked toward the border guards with their hands over their heads, but the Tibetans shot
them, killing Mackiernan and two of the Russians. To add insult to injury, the guards cut the
heads off the corpses. Their remains are buried at that spot.
With documents from the National Archives, Mackiernan's widow, and other sources, Gup
pulled the CIA's first casualty out of the classified shadows. To this day, the Agency refuses to
acknow-ledge Mackiernan's existence.




05
AFTER 9/11, THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WANTED TO POISON
AFGHANISTAN'S FOOD SUPPLY
One of the strangest things the media do is to bury huge revelations deep in the bowels of a
larger story. A perfect example occurs in "10 Days in September," an epic eight-day series that
ran in the Washington Post. In part six, Bob Woodward and Dan Balz are recounting the Bush
Administration's activities on September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks. Bush and
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have headed to the Pentagon to be briefed on action
against Afghanistan by a two-star general from the Special Operation Command:
Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to the
Pentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared
for Bush and got a big surprise.
One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box —
Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United States
doesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would
effectively be a chemical or biological attack — clearly banned by treaties that the United
States had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
Nice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of the
United States," she said.
Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said.
Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slide
and that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld.
06
THE US GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT THE NUMBER OF TERRORISM
CONVICTIONS IT OBTAINS
Naturally enough, the Justice Department likes to trumpet convictions of terrorists. Besides
garnering great publicity and allowing the citizenry to sleep snugly at night, this means more
money for the department. The problem is that the numbers are a sham.
The story broke when the Philadelphia Inquirer examined convictions that the Justice
Depart-ment said involved terrorism during the five year-period ending September 30, 2001.
They found ludicrous examples of misclassification:
In one vivid example, an assistant US attorney in San Francisco asked US District Judge
Marilyn H. Patel on Monday to stiffen a sentence against an Arizona man who got drunk
on a United Airlines flight from Shanghai, repeatedly rang the call button, demanded more
liquor, and put his hands on a flight attendant. Justice Department records show the case
as "domestic terrorism."

05
AFTER 9/11, THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WANTED TO POISON
AFGHANISTAN'S FOOD SUPPLY
One of the strangest things the media do is to bury huge revelations deep in the bowels of a
larger story. A perfect example occurs in "10 Days in September," an epic eight-day series that
ran in the Washington Post. In part six, Bob Woodward and Dan Balz are recounting the Bush
Administration's activities on September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks. Bush and
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have headed to the Pentagon to be briefed on action
against Afghanistan by a two-star general from the Special Operation Command:
Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to the
Pentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared
for Bush and got a big surprise.
One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box —
Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United States
doesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would
effectively be a chemical or biological attack — clearly banned by treaties that the United
States had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
Nice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of the
United States," she said.
Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said.
Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slide
and that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld.
06
THE US GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT THE NUMBER OF TERRORISM
CONVICTIONS IT OBTAINS
Naturally enough, the Justice Department likes to trumpet convictions of terrorists. Besides
garnering great publicity and allowing the citizenry to sleep snugly at night, this means more
money for the department. The problem is that the numbers are a sham.
The story broke when the Philadelphia Inquirer examined convictions that the Justice
Depart-ment said involved terrorism during the five year-period ending September 30, 2001.
They found ludicrous examples of misclassification:
In one vivid example, an assistant US attorney in San Francisco asked US District Judge
Marilyn H. Patel on Monday to stiffen a sentence against an Arizona man who got drunk
on a United Airlines flight from Shanghai, repeatedly rang the call button, demanded more
liquor, and put his hands on a flight attendant. Justice Department records show the case
as "domestic terrorism."

In another case: "A tenant fighting eviction called his landlord, impersonated an FBI agent, and
said the bureau did not want the tenant evicted. The landlord recognized the man's voice and
called the real FBI."
Other "terrorist" incidents included prisoners rioting for better food, "the former court employee
who shoved and threatened a judge," and "[s]even Chinese sailors [who] were convicted of
taking over a Taiwanese fishing boat and sailing to the US territory of Guam, where they hoped
to win political asylum."
After this chicanery was exposed, Republican Congressman Dan Burton asked the General
Accounting Office — a nonpartisan governmental unit that investigates matters for Congress —
to look into the Justice Department's claims of terrorist convictions. Sure enough, the GAO
reported that the situation isn't nearly as rosy as we've been told.
In the year after 9/11 — from September 30, 2001, to that date the following year — the Justice
Department maintained that 288 terrorists had been convicted in the US of their heinous crimes.
But the GAO found that at least 132 of these cases (approximately 42 percent) had nothing to do
with terrorism. Because of the GAO's methodology, it didn't verify every one of the remaining
166 convictions, so it refers to their accuracy as "questionable."
The deception is even worse when you zoom in on the cases classified as "international
terrorism," which are the most headline-grabbing of all. Out of 174 such convictions, 131 (an
amazing 75 percent) weren't really about terror.
After all of this humiliation, the Justice Department must've cleaned up its act, right? That's what
it told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Well, the paper did a follow-up on "terrorism" cases for the first
two months of 2003. Out of the 56 federal cases supposedly involving terrorism, at least 41 were
bogus. Eight of them involved Puerto Ricans protesting the Navy's use of Vieques as a bombing
range. The prosecutor who handled these cases says she doesn't know why they were classified
as terrorism. Similarly, 28 Latinos were arrested for working at airports with phony ID, and a
spokesman for the US Attorney says they weren't even suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The most ridiculous example: "A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing
bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader."



07
THE US IS PLANNING TO PROVOKE TERRORIST ATTACKS
Perhaps the government won't need to inflate its terrorism-arrest stats after it implements the
Defense Science Board's recommendation. This influential committee inside the Pentagon has
proposed a terrifying way to fight evil-doers: Goad them into making terrorist attacks. Yes, you
read correctly. Instead of waiting for a plot to be hatched and possibly executed, go out and make
it happen.

In summer 2002, the Defense Science Board outlined all kinds of ways to fight the war on
terrorism around the world. The scariest suggestion involves the creation of a new 100-man,
$100-million team called the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG.
This combination of elite special forces soldiers and intelligence agents will have "an entirely
new capability to proactively, pre-emptively provoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups,"
according to the DSB's report.
Just how the P2OG will "provoke" terrorists into action is not specified, at least in the
unclassified portions of the report. United Press International — which apparently has access to
the full, classified version of the report — says that techniques could include "stealing their
money or tricking them with fake communications." The Moscow Times offers further
possibilities, such as killing family members and infiltrating the groups with provocateurs, who
will suggest and even direct terrorist strikes.
Once the terrorists have been provoked, what then? UPI says that by taking action, the terrorists
would be "exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces." In other words, the
plan is to hit the hornet's nest with a stick, while waiting nearby with a can of bug spray. The
flaws in this approach are obvious. Although not spelled out in the UPI article or the report itsef,
the idea seems to be that the P2OG will cause terrorists to make an attack but supposedly stop
them light before the attack actually occurs. Will the P2OG always be able to prevent terrorism it
creates from taking place? Will it always be able to "neutralize" all of the terrorists during that
crucial window after a plan has been put into motion but before it's been carried out? I wouldn't
want to bet lives on it. But that's exactly what's happening.
Whenever any future terrorist attack occurs — an embassy is truck-bombed, a nightclub is
blown to smithereens, prominent buildings are hit with hijacked passenger jets — we'll never be
100 percent sure that this wasn't an operation the P2OG provoked but then was unable to stop in time.



08
THE US AND SOVIET UNION CONSIDERED DETONATING NUCLEAR BOMBS ON
THE MOON
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the United
States and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.
It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government
got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center
spearheaded the project (labeled A119, "A Study of Lunar Research Flights").
The idea was to shock and awe the Soviet Union, and everybody else, with a massive display of
American nuclear might. What better demonstration than an atomic explosion on our closest
celestial neighbor? According to the project's reports, the flash would've been visible to the
naked eye on Earth. (It's been suggested that another motivation may have been to use the Moon
as a test range, thus avoiding the problems with irradiating our home planet.)
Carl Sagan was among the scientists lending his intellectual muscle to this hare-brained scheme.
The project's leader was physicist Leonard Reiffel, who said: "I made it clear at the time there
would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force
were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth."
When a reporter for Reuters asked him what had happened to Project A119, Reiffel replied,
"After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the
world of classified activities."
Astoundingly, this wasn't the only time that a nuclear strike on the Moon was contemplated.
Science reporter Keay Davidson reveals that "in 1956, W.W. Kellogg of RAND Corporation
considered the possibility of launching an atomic bomb to the Moon." In 1957, NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory put forth Project Red Socks, the first serious proposal to send spacecraft
to the Moon. One of its lesser suggestions was to nuke the Moon in order to send lunar rocks
hurtling back to Earth, where they could be collected and studied. The following year, the
leading American astronomer of the time, Gerard Kuiper, coauthored a memo which considered
the scientific advantages of nuking the Moon. The creator of the hydrogen bomb, physicist
Edward Teller, similarly mused about dropping atomic bombs on the Moon in order to study the
seismic waves they would create.
The Soviet Union got in on the act, also in the late 1950s. Project E-4 would've used a probe
armed with an A-bomb to blast the Moon, apparently as a display of one-upmanship. The idea
reached the stage of a full-scale model but was aborted for fear of the probe falling back to Earth.



09
TWO ATOMIC BOMBS WERE DROPPED ON NORTH CAROLINA
Fortunately, no atomic bombs were dropped on the Moon, but the same can't be said of North
Carolina. The Tar Heel State's brush with nuclear catastrophe came on January 24, 1961, about
half past midnight. A B-52 with two nukes on-board was cruising the skies near Goldsboro and
Faro when its right wing leaked fuel and exploded. The jet disintegrated. Five crewmen survived,
while three died.
The two MARK 39 thermonuclear bombs disengaged from the jet. Each one had a yield of two
to tour megatons (reports vary), up to 250 times as powerful as the bomb that decimated
Hiroshima. The parachute opened on one of them, and it drifted to the earth relatively gently. But
the parachute failed to open on the other, so it plowed into a marshy patch of land owned by a
farmer.
The nuke with the parachute was recovered easily. However, its twin proved much more difficult
to retrieve. Because of the swampiness of the area, workers were able to drag out only part of the
bomb. One of its most crucial components — the "secondary," which contains nuclear material
— is still in the ground, probably around 150 feet down.
The federal government bought rights to this swatch of land to prevent any owners from digging
more than five feet under the surface. To this day, state regulators test the radiation levels of the
ground water in the area every year. The head of the North Carolina Division of Radiation
Protection has said that they've found only normal levels but that "there is still an open question
as to whether a hazard exists."
The big question is whether or not North Carolina's own Fat Man and Little Boy could've
actually detonated. Due to the technicalities of nuclear weapons — and the ambiguous nature of
the terms "unarmed," "armed," and "partially armed" — it's hard to give a definitive answer. We
do know this: The Defense Department said that the ill-fated B-52 was part of a program (since
discontinued) that continuously kept nuclear bombs in the air, ready for dropping. So, the answer
is yes, that jet was fully capable of unleashing its A-bombs in completely armed mode, with all
that this implies — mushroom clouds, vaporized people, dangerous radiation levels for decades,
etc.
According to the late Chuck Hansen — one of the world's leading authorities on nuclear
weapons — the pilot of the B-52 would've had to throw a switch to arm the bombs. Since he
didn't, the bombs couldn't have gone off. Hansen mentions the possibility that the switch
could've been activated while the jet was breaking apart and exploding. Luckily this didn't
happen, but it was a possibility.
That switch apparently was the only thing that stopped the bombs from turning part of North
Carolina into toast. The government's own reports show that for both bombs, three of the four
arming devices had activated. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara further
corroborated this during a press conference, saying that the nukes "went through all but one" of
the necessary steps.
Hansen told college students researching this near-miss:
This was a very dangerous incident and I suspect that steps were taken afterwards to
prevent any repetition of it. I do not now know of any other weapon accident that came this
close to a full-scale nuclear detonation (which is not to say that any such incident did not
occur later).



10
WORLD WAR III ALMOST STARTED IN 1995
What were you doing on January 25, 1995? Whatever it was, it was almost the last thing you
ever did. On that day, the world came within minutes of a nuclear war between the US and
Russia.
Norway and the United States had launched a research rocket (for charting the Arctic) from a
Norwegian island. Following standard protocol, Norway had alerted Russia in advance about the
firing, but the message never made its way to the right people. In the middle of the night,
Russian radar detected what looked like a nuclear missile launched toward Moscow from a US
submarine.
The military immediately called President Boris Yeltsin, awakening him with the news that the
country appeared to be under attack (no word on whether Yeltsin had been in a vodka-induced
drunken slumber). The groggy president, for the first time ever, activated the infamous black
suitcase that contains the codes for launching nuclear missiles. He had just a few minutes to
decide whether to launch any or all of the country's 2,000 hair-trigger nukes at the US.
Luckily for the entire world, while Yeltsin was conferring with his highest advisors, Russia's
radar showed that the missile was headed out to sea. The red alert was cancelled. World War III
was averted.
What makes this even more nerve-racking is that Russia's early-warning systems are in much
worse shape now than they were in '95. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
explains that while Russia needs 21 satellites to have a complete, fully-redundant network
capable of accurately detecting missile launches, as of 1999 they have only three. Heaven help us
if some Russian bureaucrat again forgets to tell the command and control center that a nearby
country is launching a research rocket.