January 21, 1968

The author connects the beginning of the battle of Khe Sanh with a nuclear accident in Greenland and an assassination attempt in South Korea that caused a global Cold War crisis.

By Michael Archer, January 19, 2023 (from Michael Archer’s Blog)

Those of you who have tolerated my scribblings over the years know that January 21 is a significant date in my life. Fifty-five years ago, this coming Saturday, the siege of Khe Sanh Combat Base in South Vietnam began at about 3 AM with hundreds of North Vietnamese Army soldiers attacking Hill 861, just west of Khe Sanh base; followed by another large-scale attack on the Hoang Hoa District Headquarters compound in Khe Sanh village (where I was truly convinced I would be drawing my last breath), just to the south. Right before sunrise, enemy artillery and rockets, from positions in South Vietnam and across the border in Laos, slammed into the combat base destroying the Marine regiment’s main ammunition dump—where 98 percent of its firepower was stored. The battle for Khe Sanh would rage on until July of that year when the base and its hill outposts were finally determined to be untenable, given the number of enemy forces surrounding them and the inability to stop the incessant artillery fire, and were abandoned. Thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of North Vietnamese Army soldiers, would be killed, wounded, or go missing in action during those six months.

Fighting at Khe Sanh was among the most highly publicized in the war, but what is less known about that day in January was other events, thousands of miles away, would coalesce with the attack on Khe Sanh in nearly triggering World War III, and an accidental launch of nuclear missiles by the United States. In Seoul, South Korea, a special assault team from North Korea’s People’s Army launched a surprise attack on the Blue House, the residence of South Korea’s President Park Chung-Hee, in a mission to assassinate him. The attackers got within 350 yards of the president before engaging in a firefight with South Korean police. All but one of the commandos was killed, telling investigators that the objective had been to “agitate the South Korean people to fight with arms against their government and the American imperialists.” It was an act of international aggression that, had it been successful, could not have been tolerated without retaliation.

 

Also on January 21, 1968, a U.S. B-52 Stratofortress caught fire and crashed in Greenland, losing its cargo of four Mark 28 thermonuclear bombs. The disaster happened while the bomber was monitoring the early warning system above the U.S. Air Force’s Thule Air Base. The fire was caused by several cloth-covered, foam-rubber cushions that a crew member had placed to make his chair more comfortable, inadvertently blocking an air vent. When the co-pilot switched on a backup heating system, the cushions were sucked into the plane’s intake manifold and caught fire. The seven-man crew safely ejected before the plane crashed. High-level conventional explosives inside the four thermonuclear weapons exploded on impact, contaminating three square miles of ice with radioactive plutonium. However, because the “one-point” safety design worked, the nuclear fusion process was prevented, avoiding catastrophe. It was later observed that: “If the Mark 28 hadn’t been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three— without any warning, near an air base considered essential for the defense of the United States— could have been misinterpreted at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command” as a hostile attack.[i] Later testing determined that the electrical circuits in the weapons’ safety devices became unreliable in a fire and allowed connections to short circuit. This triggered [ii]research into developing fireproof casings for nuclear weapons.

 

Situations where such “misinterpretation” might have triggered a nuclear holocaust were not as uncommon as we’d like to think. The most famous occurred amid the Reagan Administration’s sword-rattling, nuclear brinksmanship just three weeks after the Soviet military shot down a Korean Airlines commercial flight that had strayed over Soviet territory.

 

 

On September 26, 1983, the Soviet missile attack early-warning system computer suddenly flashed a message to launch, advising the duty officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, that there was a high probability an American intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet Union. In rapid succession, the warning system signaled that four more missiles were on their way.

Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, later saying he believed if it were an actual attack, there would be hundreds of launches. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had malfunctioned, misidentifying the reflection of sunlight off clouds as US missile launches. Because of his decision not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike in that highly charged climate of hostility between the US and USSR, Petrov would become internationally famous and credited with having “saved the world.” If he had decided to obey his orders and notified his superiors, Soviet nuclear doctrine would have called for them to launch a full nuclear retaliation; with no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US.

Petrov’s Russian army superiors were not as impressed as the international community would later be, subjecting him to days of interrogation before deciding he insufficiently documented his actions during the crisis. The resulting official reprimand ended his military career. Until his death in 2017, at the age of 77, Petrov insisted that he had been made a scapegoat to deflect blame away from the mistakes of higher-ups. (Given what is currently going on in Ukraine, it seems the Russian army has not made significant strides since then in improving morale and developing esprit de corps). But I digress.

Two days after its failed 1968 assassination attempt on the South Korean president, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying. (All surviving crewmembers would be released the following December). Jangled nerves at the White House and Pentagon from these events had the US gearing up for another land war in Korea. However, on January 26, an A-12 Blackbird reconnaissance jet at 80,000 feet over North Korea, flown by CIA pilot Jack Weeks, successfully located the missing USS Pueblo, and in the same mission, discovered that there were no North Korean troops massing near the demilitarized zone for a potential invasion of the south, easing fears of a new Korean War. Four days after that reconnaissance flight information was received, Viet Cong sappers attempted to breach the presidential palace in Saigon, along with the US Embassy there, in the opening shots of the Tet Offensive, resulting in weeks of widespread communist attacks throughout the country.

Given the coincidental nature of attacks in Korea and Vietnam, and the close diplomatic relationship between Pyongyang and Hanoi, it immediately raised the question of whether these events were coordinated between the two governments. And since both these countries were benefactors of Soviet military equipment, and were essentially the site of proxy wars in the greater Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, there was some concern that these actions might be provoked by Moscow.

The U.S. was already pitted in Vietnam against the sixth-largest army in the world, and still might soon be fighting North Korea’s 350,000-person military. In between, and bordering both countries, was the People’s Republic of China, hostile to the United States and its allies. Though China was then in the destabilizing throes of a Maoist purge called The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it could be dangerously unpredictable and might send hundreds of thousands of its troops into the fray, as it had done in Korea in 1950.

Entrance to the Khe Sanh command bunker. Lots of heads bumped by that low hatch beam to the left.

If U.S. aircraft and troops were to be diverted from Southeast Asia to fight a new war to protect South Korea, the Pentagon would be forced to make tough decisions on how to use its remaining resources in South Vietnam most effectively. Those of us hunkered down and surrounded at isolated Khe Sanh were grimly aware of our expendability in such a scenario.

About that time, our target intelligence officer, Captain Mirza Munir Baig, the subject of my book The Gunpowder Prince, created several transparent overlays for his map in the Khe Sanh command center bunker, each covered with rectangular grids representing a space about one mile long by a one-half mile wide. Each grid was marked with a distinct identification number that could be used to quickly request a devastating B-52 strike using conventional bombs on that specific area.

 

 

One night in February, I commented to him that our command center bunker was in the center of one of those numbered grids, to which he replied: “That’s correct, Bru (my nickname), just in case this place should abruptly change ownership.” He then chuckled softly at the dark irony of his having to finish our besiegers’ job for them.

Over the succeeding years I have been unable to find a satisfactory answer as to whether, having been pre-targeted for such a bombing, the Pentagon would have given final approval. And, if so, had they fully vetted all potential consequences of that decision? As an example, if we had been overrun by the enemy in a replication of the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, there would have been many hundreds of American captives. Would these lives have been a price the commander-in-chief was prepared to pay to increase the enemy body count and deprive North Vietnam—now with a stupendous propaganda victory in hand—an additional windfall in captured U.S. arms and equipment?

We had all come to rely on Captain Baig, like some chess grandmaster, to have worked out in his mind the details of every possible scenario. Yet, this did not seem to me to be the way he envisioned an end to a life so fated with lofty historical purpose—a shattered; unidentifiable corpse entombed with two dozen others in the rubble of the command center after a self-inflicted bombing. Despite their best efforts, North Vietnamese forces never got closer than three hundred yards from the command center and so made such a dire decision unnecessary.

 

It is amusing now to imagine if the grimly cynical Darwin Awards (i.e., it is just as well they’re out of the gene pool) were in existence in 1968, a nominee would surely be the B-52 crew member over Greenland whose desire to make his rear end more comfortable, might have started a nuclear war had the safety design even partially failed on any of those four hydrogen bombs. But in all fairness, I can think of several (now-inexplicable) 19-year-old-kid decisions I made during the siege of Khe Sanh that might have put me in contention.

 

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’. I would humbly suggest that, in the case of January 21, 1968, the verse be slightly altered from “saddest” to “gladdest.”

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin, 2014) p323