Guardian of Lies

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Nuclear Warhead and the Cuban Backstory

The foundation of this story is constructed on historic fact.

The warhead used in this story is a fourteen-kiloton device for an obsolete Soviet FKR cruise missile. It possessed roughly the same destructive force as Little Boy, the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy knew about the existence in Cuba of other warheads for the R-14 and R-12, intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles (1- and 2-megaton devices). However these remained on board the ship Aleksandrovsk and were never off-loaded or deployed in Cuba.

However, the deadly secret-one that could easily have resulted in a global nuclear holocaust-was that there were also approximately one hundred battlefield nuclear weapons on the island, each one capable of destroying a good-size city. For thirty years the United States had not even the slightest clue that there were a large number of tactical nuclear weapons on the island in 1962. This was not made public until the early nineties following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In October 1962, Kennedy placed U.S. troops on alert, including marines at Camp Pendleton in California, for possible invasion of Cuba. Many of these troops had already been deployed to Florida for possible use in an invasion of the island. If he had ordered that invasion, we now know that because of limited intelligence regarding the lethal potential of Russian battlefield weapons on Cuba, any amphibious landing would have resulted in a nuclear nightmare.

Forty-four of the FKR warheads arrived at the port of La Isabela, Cuba, on the morning of October 25, 1962, shortly after President Kennedy declared a naval blockade of the island.

The FKRs were short-range battlefield tactical weapons. They were designed to be delivered by a type of cruise missile, a scaled-down version of the old Russian MiG with an effective range of about a hundred miles. Under the heightened tension of the time, the U.S. naval blockade, and the possibility of an invasion, the FKRs and their warheads were deployed immediately to Oriente Province for possible use against the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay and to protect the Cuban coastline from any U.S. invasion.

After the crisis, the world was told that all of the Russian nuclear weapons were removed from Cuba by Christmas Day, December 25, 1962. But we now know that that was not true because many of the tactical nuclear weapons remained, at least for a while. We also now know that these battlefield weapons were a major point of contention between Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. Castro wanted the tactical nuclear weapons to remain on the island in hopes that they might ultimately be placed under Cuban control. Castro saw these as the ultimate guarantee that there would be no further attempts by the United States to invade Cuba. However, Khrushchev was concerned because during the missile crisis, Castro had urged the Russians to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States, believing the winner would be the one who struck first. The Soviet premier was terrified that if Castro got his hands on the weapons and attacked the United States, Russia would be drawn into a full-scale nuclear war. At some point it is reported that Khrushchev removed all of the tactical nuclear weapons from the island, though the date of action is unclear.

At the conclusion of the crisis, Kennedy argued for on-site verification, a tour of the Russian nuclear storage facilities on Cuba by U.S. and international officials to assure themselves that the missiles and the warheads were gone. But because of continuing friction in U.S.-Soviet relations, this never happened. Instead the United States was forced to rely on aerial surveillance and reconnaissance photos to track the removal and return of the missiles and warheads to Russia.

However, U.S. officials never knew about the tactical battlefield weapons. So when the large long-range missiles and their warheads, packed into nuclear storage vans, were identified on board ships on their way back to the Soviet Union, they assumed that all weapons of mass destruction were removed from the island. We know now that this was not true.

In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated amid rumors that Soviet and Cuban intrigue may have played a role in his death. In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was deposed and forced to step down as Soviet premier in large part because of his loss of face in the international community as a result of the missile crisis.

Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

The term “tickling the dragon’s tail” was in fact coined by physicist Richard Feynman at Los Alamos in the early days of experimentation following development of the first successful nuclear devices. At the time, physicists were involved in “criticality testing” to determine the precise mass of fissile materials (highly enriched uranium) required to reach near-critical levels in order to trigger a chain reaction. These tests (that were somewhat crude and later determined to be far too dangerous to continue in the same manner) involved the movement of two elements of highly enriched uranium in close proximity to each other to test the emission of radiation. Dr. Feynman referred to these experiments as “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon” because of the risk that any slip of the hand could be fatal.

In fact during two incidents, one in August 1945 and the other in May 1946, two scientists, Harry Daghlian Jr. and Louis Slotin, were irradiated with lethal doses of radiation poisoning. In each of those cases the same core of 6.2 kilograms (roughly 14 pounds) of plutonium, later dubbed the “demon core,” was used in the experiments. All further testing of this kind was scrubbed as a result of these accidents.

The Slotin accident reports state that Slotin was engaged in testing the commencement of a fission reaction by bringing two metal hemispheres of highly reactive, beryllium-coated plutonium into close proximity without allowing them to touch. On the date in question, May 21, 1946, after successfully conducting the experiment on numerous occasions, the metal screwdriver used to separate the two hemispheres slipped and allowed contact. Observers reported “a blue glow and a wave of heat that swept through the room” as the air itself became ionized. The heat was unbearable, and the brilliant flash of blue was reported to be brighter than the sunshine of a spring day. A prickling metallic taste was experienced on the tongue of those in the room. Slotin is reputed to have shielded others with his own body. He died nine days later and was buried in Winnipeg, Canada.

The blue glow is known as cerenkov radiation and is the result of highly charged particles, such as electrons, traveling through transparent material at a speed greater than the local speed of light. There is some debate among scientists as to whether the blue flash actually occurs or is merely the result of ionization of the moisture in the eyeballs of those witnessing the chain reaction.

The Threat of the Drug Cartels

Today the dangers emanating from the Mexican drug cartels, chiefly in Tijuana, Juárez, and Sinaloa, cannot be overstated. In the eighties and early nineties, the U.S. government launched a war against the narcotic drug lords of Colombia. At that time Mexico was a part of the transportation network for the movement of illicit narcotics from Colombia into the United States.

Since then, with the death of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the disruption of the Cali and Medellín cartels, the organized violence of the drug underworld has only moved closer to the southern border of the United States. In recent years it has intensified and is reputed to have corrupted large segments of Mexico ’s government and law enforcement in the same way that it did in Colombia two decades earlier. To believe that we in this country are immune to such corrupting influences is foolishness.

The cartels are now centered in cities such as Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and Juárez, where scores of people are murdered daily in ongoing turf wars over who will control the drug trade. That these cartels have links to Middle Eastern terror groups should come as no surprise, since Al Qaeda and others generate much of their revenue for terrorist opera tions from poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere and are believed to be well connected within the drug underworld.

It is also well known that the cartels and those smuggling illicit drugs into the United States have in the past used tunnels as the preferred method for shipping large quantities of “product” under the U.S.-Mexican border. As the American economy declines and revenue from illegal narcotics escalates, the cartels that already employ their own private forces armed with automatic weapons, including grenade launchers, become an even greater threat. The commander of the U.S. marine base at Camp Pendleton, California, recently posted Tijuana, Mexico, as off-limits to all marine personnel because it was judged to be too dangerous a venue for rest and tourism. U.S. marines can travel to Baghdad and Afghanistan, but they can no longer cross the border into Mexico without special permission. This should tell us something about the emerging dangers along our southern border.