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Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
'Nobody is truly gone until they are forgotten': Residents remember the fallen on Memorial Day
May 27—VFW Post 447 Quarter Master Greg Sundholm encouraged those in attendance at the Memorial Day ceremony at Graceland Cemetery to remember those who have died in service of this country. "Nobody is truly gone until they are forgotten," Sundholm said during his remarks. Paraphrasing Gen. George S. Patton, Sundholm said it is wrong to mourn those who died — instead people should be thankful that they lived. The ceremony at Graceland Cemetery was one of several slated throughout the area at various cemeteries. The Honor Guard started the day at Lakewood Cemetery, followed by ceremonies at St. Theodore Catholic Cemetery, Hillcrest Cemetery and the Freeborn County veterans memorial. There was also the 53rd annual wreath drop ceremony on Fountain Lake by pilot Jim Hanson. Sundholm, who said he signed up for the delayed enlistment program in 1987 as a high school junior because he wanted to work on airplanes, left for basic training in December 1988. He said he was stationed to Strategic Air Command in upstate New York, where his primary job was nuclear deterrence. He later served in the 416th Bomb Wing, where he worked on B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and he was ultimately deployed. He said when he left active duty, he joined the 934th Airlift Wing, looking for an aircraft job, but they didn't have one, so he then became a weapons instructor and armorer. He medically retired in 1997. 'As I learned in my time in the military, we build on traditions of the past for the future," Sundholm said, noting that he learned many lessons and gained a connection to those who are honored on Memorial Day. He said exposure to them gives him a desire to be better than they are they before at the very least. VFW Post 447 Cmdr. Bob Sharp read from an article he recently shared. He said in every society there are many callings — whether it be firefighters, teachers, caregivers or statesmen. But the path of the warrior is one of the most difficult. "Throughout history, warriors have been called upon to protect their families, communities and countries — to fight for others' safety and freedom, knowing that this path of service may include their life and the suffering of their loved ones." He said it requires courage, commitment and resilience and said no one desires peace more than the warriors and their families because they know the true cost of war. "These warriors have never sought war, but they never flinched when their country called," he said. "It's through their actions that we enjoy the blessings of liberty, and through the tears of their families that we have the freedoms we all take for granted." The ceremony also included a placing of the wreaths by representatives from area veterans organizations, as well as the Minnesota National Guard, Gold Star family Don and Deb Goodnature, and POW-MIA representative Al "Minnow" Brooks. There were also several musical selections by Debbie Nordland, along with a military medley, as well as a volley fire by the American Legion Post 56 Honor Guard and taps by bugler Ed Nelson of American Legion Post 56.
Asia Times
29-04-2025
- Science
- Asia Times
As global players focus on the Arctic, US icebreakers are scarce
Nowhere on earth is global warming proceeding more rapidly than inside the Arctic Circle. Over the past two decades, the Arctic has grown five degrees Celsius warmer. And the trend is accelerating, with the Arctic warming nearly four times as rapidly as the rest of the planet. Climate scientists expect that Arctic median temperatures will rise as much as 2 degrees Celsius annually over the coming decade. Although temperatures normally change with glacial speed, in the Arctic those transformations are now noticeable to the naked eye: Last year marked a concerning increase in arctic wildfires and flooding. And, as climate change continues unabated, the waters of the Arctic Sea, which stretch from Russia's northern Siberian shores across Alaska to Greenland, are opening at an unprecedented pace. This is bringing regularly scheduled commercial navigation to the Arctic for the first time in recorded history. Attempts to circumnavigate Eurasia are certainly not new. Almost three centuries ago, in 1728, Vitus Bering rounded the strait between Alaska and Siberia that bears his name to explore the polar seas. It was not until the 1870s that the Northern Sea route across the Arctic's Russian coast was even navigated fully by explorers. And only in 2013 did a commercial vessel actually make the entire long northern trek from Europe to Asia, even with an icebreaker escort. Yet in the last decade, the Arctic Seas have become significantly more navigable. As a result, geopolitics is rapidly arriving in the region, a trend that I outline in my recent book, Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics. For starters, the economic stakes are higher than ever. The Arctic is a vast, unexploited storehouse of raw materials critical to 21st century competition. The region harbors roughly a quarter of the unexplored oil and natural gas reserves on earth, as well as 150 rare earth deposits, valued at around $1 trillion. Platinum, nickel, and other rare metals stored below the ocean are crucial to high-tech industries, and therefore to the countries and companies seeking to preserve industrial power status. The Arctic Sea, roughly 1.5 times the size of the United States, is relatively shallow, making it amenable to exploitation, climatic conditions permitting, with 240 species of fish in ample quantities, adding to all the inanimate resources. The political-military stakes are as high as the economic ones, with the international system increasingly polarized and the Arctic a prime bone of contention. The Arctic Ocean is an area of unusual importance and a natural zone of conflict due to its geographic value. It is across the North Pole that the United States and Russia lie in closest proximity, making the Arctic seas a natural arena of rivalry in the nuclear age. The same geopolitical reality has episodically made Greenland important: it is not accidental that the US submitted a bid to buy Greenland in 1946; that the US has maintained a major Strategic Air Command base in northern Greenland since 1951; or that President Donald Trump has been obsessed with Greenland as well. Current international conflicts are amplifying the economic and military dimensions of Arctic competition. Russia, in particular, has strong stakes for status-quo revision in the rapidly emerging Arctic sea lanes. Fifty-three percent of the Arctic shore lies in Russia (compared with less than four percent for America's Alaska). The Northern Seaway along Russia's northern Arctic shores is becoming navigable as the continent warms more rapidly than on the US-Canadian side. Crucially, the opening of the Arctic Ocean to commerce and naval transport gives Russia unimpeded access to the open sea that it has sought for centuries – from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin – but never decisively achieved elsewhere in the world. The Arctic has likewise become a zone of strong geo-economic and geopolitical interest for China in recent years. Arctic energy resources, of course, are naturally attractive to the largest energy consumer on earth. China is especially motivated to win the Arctic exploration race because it imports heavily from the Persian Gulf via vulnerable Indo-Pacific sea lanes that are dominated by the United States. Once accessible to China, the Arctic would solve the problem of American strangulation of chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca. It would also extend Beijing's critical minerals lead, further complicating Washington's efforts to compete effectively. And Beijing's congenial ties to Russia, a powerful force in the Arctic, are an additional geopolitical plus. Global economic and political-military stakes driving today's Arctic geopolitical competition began in slow motion. In August 2007, Russia planted a titanium flag on the North Pole. Moscow now quietly claims over 50 percent of the Arctic Ocean floor. Two decades ago, with Vladimir Putin in power, Russia began refurbishing Cold War military bases in the North, and building more icebreakers. Today it has well over 40 bases, roughly a third more than the combined total for all the major NATO powers in the near-Arctic, including Finland, Canada and the United States.. The atomic icebreaker Yamal assisting in the dismantling of a Russian North Pole research station in 2009; Photo: Moscow Times On the economic side, Russia has also pioneered exploitation of energy resources along the Arctic shores – with China's help. Moscow's original proposals two decades ago were to involve Western multinationals such as Exxon, Shell, and British Petroleum, with their superior technology for drilling in Arctic climes. Western firms soon fell away, however, both for economic reasons and following the sanctions associated with the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In 2013 Russia began construction on the massive $27 billion Yamal LNG project on the Arctic shores, with China's CNPC as a 20 percent shareholder. The first Yamal LNG train was completed in 2017. In 2018 Russia also began construction on the nearby Gydan Peninsula Arctic II project, again with East Asian participation. In exchange for the provision of capital and equipment, China receives Russian oil from these specific projects today – and does so illicitly through the Northern Sea Route. Economic logic – Russia's massive resources, coupled with the economic rise of Asia – propelled gradual Arctic sea-lane development for fifteen years in the early twenty-first century. Yet it was critical junctures – short, sharp periods of structural transformation like war – that catalyzed the age of serious Arctic maritime geopolitics currently prevailing. Western sanctions following Russia's occupation of Crimea were one catalytic event, but far more important was Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. That led to several sweeping geo-economic and geo-political changes animating the intense Arctic maritime geopolitics now emerging. Climate change, as noted above, is a quiet background factor raising the stakes of geopolitical conflict: When the seas are opened, economic and political-military opportunities become more realistic. The decisive responses of key players to the new Russian aggression, however, were what gave explosive new life to simmering geopolitical rivalries. Most importantly, Finland (April, 2023) and then Sweden (March, 2024) became members of NATO. Following their actions, seven of the eight nations directly bordering on the Arctic were members of NATO, with only Russia – with the longest Arctic coastline and the strongest economic stakes – excluded. Russia not surprisingly responded to the new geopolitical environment surrounding the Ukraine conflict with countermeasures of its own. As Putin himself has stressed, Arctic development is an 'indisputable priority' with Russia, due to its strategic importance and economic potential. To consolidate its position in a vital region, Moscow has both escalated provocative actions of its own in the Arctic, as in the Baltic seas also, and simultaneously teamed up with China to put pressure on NATO and on the US bilaterally. In 2023 ships from the Russian and Chinese navies jointly patrolled near Alaska; in July 2024 Russian and Chinese bombers launched a collaborative probe in the US ADIZ over the Bering Sea within 200 miles of the Alaskan coast; and in October, 2024, the Russian and Chinese Coast Guards conducted their first joint patrol in the Arctic seas. The United States has naturally responded to Russian and Chinese Arctic brinkmanship. In 2013, following the first Arctic seaway transit of China's icebreaker Xue Long ( Ice Dragon ) and the inauguration of Russia's Yamal LNG project, the Obama administration articulated a US Arctic strategy. In 2014 Washington made controls over the supply of advanced US cold-water oil-drilling technology a major element of Crimea sanctions. In 2024 the Biden administration's Department of Defense issued an update to the 2013 strategy, mentioning both Russia and China as primary challengers, with the goal o curbing Russia's long-term Arctic development capacity. The US has grown steadily bolder in its Arctic response, with an increasingly bipartisan emphasis on the region. Despite far-sighted diplomatic gestures and a laudable concern regarding environmental dangers, the United States has nevertheless been slow to address the core geo-economic challenges now deepening along the Arctic sea lanes. Most importantly, the US has failed to build up its domestic icebreaker capacity, nor has it begun developing related naval capabilities that would allow it to actively contest and contain the rapid Russian and Chinese buildup along the Arctic sea lanes. And it has done remarkably little, until lately, to support its friends in the Arctic with respect to infrastructure investment support. The US, for example, has no Arctic deepwater ports to host heavy container ships. Canada has only one, lying 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even though Russia now has over 40 icebreakers, several of nuclear-powered, and an active building program, the United States presently lacks even a single heavy or medium-duty icebreaker active in the Arctic. US icebreaker capacity, such as it is, is concentrated entirely in the Great Lakes. The July, 2024 ICE agreement with Canada and Finland, concluded at the 2024 Washington NATO summit, does begin to address the icebreaker crisis in multilateral fashion. Yet the massive deficiency in America's own icebreaker capacity, rooted in the striking weaknesses of its own domestic shipbuilding industry, still remains. In the emerging game of Arctic maritime geopolitics, too many of the high cards still ominously lie in Russian and Chinese hands. Kent Calder is Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, former Special Advisor to the US Ambassador to Japan and the recent author of Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics (Brookings, 2025).
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
America's First Broken Arrow Incident Happened 75 Years Ago
The United States lost its first nuclear weapon exactly 75 years ago when a Convair B-36 Peacemaker jettisoned a single freefall nuclear bomb before crashing in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. This was the first of at least 32 known U.S. nuclear weapon accidents, of the kind known as Broken Arrows, which are defined as the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of a weapon. None of these have occurred since the Cold War, but their legacy remains a stark reminder of the enormously high stakes faced by atomic warfighters in all their forms. Just before midnight on February 13, 1950, a B-36B from Strategic Air Command's 7th Bombardment Wing-Heavy, opened its bomb bay doors at around 8,000 feet, around 55 miles northwest of Bella Bella, on the north coast of British Columbia. A single Mk 4 nuclear bomb plummeted into the Pacific Ocean; there was a bright flash on impact, followed by a sound and shockwave. The detonation was caused by the bomb's high-explosive material, with the fissile core having been removed and replaced with a lead practice core of the same weight. Otherwise, with a yield of up to 31 kilotons, it would have had roughly twice the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Led by pilot Capt. Harold Barry, the crew of the B-36 took the decision to drop the unarmed bomb after encountering serious mechanical problems in the course of a training mission. This had involved a simulated combat profile flown between Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska and Carswell Air Force Base in Texas (the latter was the home station of the 7th Bombardment Wing, Heavy). The simulated target would have been San Francisco, standing in for a Soviet or Chinese city of comparable size. At the time, the B-36 was very much the cutting-edge of Strategic Air Command — the first truly intercontinental U.S. bomber, the airframe involved in the incident was also very new, with only 186 hours of flying before its loss. Soon after taking off, the bomber had run into trouble. After entering bad weather, ice began to form on the exterior of the aircraft. In an effort to maintain the required altitude, the crew powered up the engines. Around six hours into the training mission and at an altitude of around 12,000 feet, three of the engines caught fire and had to be shut down. The bomber was now flying on its remaining three Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major radial engines — the B-model was yet to receive the four additional J47 turbojet engines, two each in two underwing pods, which appeared on later Peacemakers and gave a much-needed performance boost. Despite the emergency power settings on the three engines, the aircraft was now losing altitude. When it became apparent that level flight could no longer be maintained, the decision was made to abandon the aircraft. First, and following Air Force protocol of the time, the Mk 4 nuclear bomb had to be jettisoned, its fuze having been set to detonate at around 4,600 feet — once again, there was no nuclear material in the weapon. At this time, U.S. freefall bombs were designed to have their fissile cores inserted during flight, a safeguard that was deemed necessary for these first-generation strategic weapons. Only with a Presidential decision would a bomber take off with the fissile core onboard. Barry later told an Air Force board of inquiry, in a testimony later published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: 'We were losing altitude quite rapidly in excess of 500 feet a minute, and I asked the radar operator to give me a heading to take me out over water. We kept our rapid rate of descent, and we got out over the water just about 9,000 feet, and the copilot hit the salvo switch, and at first, nothing happened, so he hit it again and this time it opened. The radar operator gave me a heading to take me back over land, the engineer gave me emergency power to try to hold our altitude. We still descended quite rapidly, and by the time we got over land, we were at 5,000 feet. So, I rang the alarm bell and told them to leave.' Capt. Barry then set the aircraft's course to fly southwest for an ocean crash. The 17-man crew bailed out over Princess Royal Island. There was a huge rescue effort to try and recover the crew and sensitive equipment from the aircraft. In all, more than 40 U.S. and Canadian aircraft were involved. A search southwest of the bailout point found no sign of the bomber, which was, at this point, thought to have come down in the sea. Of the crew, five were never recovered. It's presumed they came down in the water between Gil and Princess Royal islands. In freezing conditions, and without exposure suits, they wouldn't have survived long; furthermore, not all the crew had inflatable life jackets. As for the B-36, the wreckage was eventually found in 1953, on the side of Mount Kologet on Vancouver Island, around 220 miles north of where the crew had bailed out. The bomber had been uncovered during a separate Royal Canadian Air Force search for a missing oil prospector. With concerns that sensitive equipment from the bomber might find its way into the Soviets' hands, the U.S. Air Force sent a recovery team, but they were initially unable to access the mountainous crash site. Two follow-up missions were sent and, finally, in 1954, a small demolition team managed to get to the crash site and secure or destroy classified parts of the bomber. One of the missing crewmembers was the atomic weaponeer, Capt. Theodore Schreier. With no confirmation that he bailed out, this led to some speculation that he may have decided to stay onboard the stricken aircraft. This, in turn, raised questions about whether the bomb had also remained on board, with Schreier attempting to nurse the aircraft back to Alaska. However, all evidence points to the crew having successfully fuzed the bomb to explode, dropping it out of the bomb bay, and watching it detonate above the water. A more recent investigation of the crash site suggests the same, with the bomb shackle showing no evidence that the plane crashed with a weapon onboard. As the site of the first Broken Arrow, the location of the crash has been visited periodically by investigators in the years since the accident. Also, trophy hunters have stripped much of what was left of the bomber for artifacts. Now, with the availability of helicopters, and with less snow on the ground, it has become much easier to reach the crash site. During a 2003 visit, an investigation team found the aft crew compartment, the rear bomb bay, and one section of the outer wing, as the only significant intact parts, with the wreckage otherwise mostly consisting of the tiny pieces left after the demolition team did their work. When the B-36 and its nuclear cargo were lost on February 13, 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were only just embarking on the Cold War and the tense nuclear standoff that would follow for decades beyond. Indeed, at the time of this incident, the United States still enjoyed a huge advantage over its adversary in terms of nuclear capability, with around 235 fully functional atomic bombs, compared to perhaps two in the Soviet Union. As the Soviets matched that gap, and the nuclear stockpiles in East and West continued to grow, the demands of maintaining and operating weapons safely became ever greater. Broken Arrow incidents have led to the confirmed loss of six nuclear weapons that were never recovered, but each incident has also served as a stark learning process, leading to revisions in how U.S. nuclear weapons are stored and operated. In the Canadian context, another Mk 4 nuclear bomb was jettisoned over Quebec later in 1950, after a Strategic Air Command B-50 suffered engine trouble, but subsequently landed safely. In that incident, the high explosive detonated, and around 100 pounds of uranium — used for the bomb's tamper, the dense metal used to hold the core together, rather than the core itself — were scattered over the nearby area. As for the U.S. Air Force, the service's nuclear-armed bombers would soon be airborne at all times, in an alert posture known as Operation Chrome Dome, which ran from 1960 to 1968. Several high-profile nuclear accidents, including the accidental release of nuclear weapons on foreign territory, saw Chrome Dome replaced. Between 1969 and 1991, the Air Force instead kept B-52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons on alert at all times to try to ensure that they could rapidly get airborne and escape any potential first strike on their operating bases and then be available to retaliate. You can read more about this doctrine in this past War Zone piece. A Broken Arrow event of the kind that happened in February 1950 might seem unthinkable today, but there have been some concerning nuclear incidents, even in more recent years. Notably, in 2007, Air Force personnel mistakenly loaded six AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, each with a W80-1 variable-yield nuclear warhead, with a maximum yield estimated at 150 kilotons, onto a B-52 at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The Stratofortress then flew with these weapons on board, unknown to the crew, to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. In the end, the aircraft was armed with live nuclear weapons for a total of 36 hours before personnel uncovered the error and instituted appropriate security and safety precautions at Barksdale. Ultimately, human beings are fallible, as are the systems they have designed to control nuclear weapons. While the Air Force may not have been involved in a Broken Arrow incident since 1980 — and the last one involved an ICBM, rather than a crewed bomber — the potential hazards of the deadly business of nuclear warfighting remain just as relevant today. Contact the author: thomas@
