Armed Forces were at DEFCON 3 status during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Thermo-nuclear war imminent, Code Red (or white) leading to World Having declared a Code Red, we wonder how that equated to theĭefense Readiness Condition, better known as the "Defcon"ģ is where the military put their air forces on standby in preparations forĭefCon2 such as to be ready for to deploy nuclear missiles in less Won’t hardly feel a thing.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. One flash of light and…well, it’ll only hurt for a moment. Oh, it’s okay - I’ve planned ahead: just down the road from me is an Air Force base, a prime military target certain to get nuked and that’s where I’m going to go if and/or when it happens. It seemed to be a win-win for everyone and the world didn’t die.Īs for me, should World War III materialize, I’ve no intention of trying to survive it or the world that comes after such an event. I think Putin is having something of his own Cuban Missile Crisis at the moment as he doesn’t want NATO nukes parked in Ukraine and, yeah, I can understand his concern about that but I think the prudent solution would be to just let Ukraine remain neutral, not join NATO, pretty much the same way we just let Cuba remain communist, sans nuclear weapons. Yes, we were one DEFCON level away from World War III, a full-on nuclear war with the Soviet Union.Īnd, last Sunday, the 28th of February in the Year of Our Lord 2022, we were there. Kennedy found intolerable - so much so that he ordered a naval blockade of the island and dared Nikita Khrushchev to try and break through it.Īnd if Khrushchev ran the blockade…well, let’s just say the world would be a very different place right now as we would have gone to DEFCON 1, that we would have considered running the blockade as an attack on the United States requiring a full nuclear retaliatory response. The last time we were at DEFCON 2 was (reportedly) in October 1962 during what was then dubbed the Cuban Missile Crisis where the then USSR was attempting to park missiles on the Castro communist regime’s island of Cuba, a situation that the United States and one President John F. Everybody shake a leg because it’s about to go down. There are no significant threats to the United States.Īt DEFCON 4, while we’re still at peace something looks to be a little threatening so out of an abundance of caution we’re going to step up security and intelligence procedures - but no worries, everything’s okay.Īt DEFCON 3, okay there’s a threat looming on the horizon and while everything’s fine (for now) we’re going to put our bomber forces on alert and get them scrambled and in the air in 15 minutes.Īt DECON 2, yup - something’s up and now we want all active duty personnel to mobilize and deploy in six hours or less. The DEFON system was implemented in November of 1959 after the construction of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command, the people in charge of monitoring and intercepting external threats to the United States) with five (5) levels of Defense Ready Condition that goes a little something like this:Īt DEFCON 5, we are at peace. In fact, I praise this move as it was a sensible, prudent thing to do.įor those of you - mostly my readers in the United Kingdom - who don’t understand our defense levels, a little history is in order.ĭEFCON is an acronym for Defense Ready Condition, DEFCON is what the Pentagon uses to indicate the level of threats the country faces from other nations, which then determines readiness for any potential response and I’ve been told you lot on the other side of pond don’t actually have something like this. I don’t begrudge my President or my Pentagon going to DEFCON 2 after Vladimir Putin decided he was going to put his nuclear forces on alert. Well, I noticed because it’s something of a hobby of mine to keep track of our military (being a former Navy man) and it’s readiness levels.īasically, it lets me know what kind of day I’m going to have.īut, again, hardly anybody noticed this monumental event with the exception of a political website in New Zealand. In fact, we were exactly one DEFCON level away from World War III.
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