But thanks to data-gathering by military space weather forecasters, a nuclear weapon exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was prevented, researchers said.
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USA military officials assumed that the Soviet Union is responsible for the jamming of their radar, which by that time is conceived as an act of war.
The US officials thought it was the Soviet Union that jammed American surveillance radars.
Solar flares are brief blasts of high-energy radiation from the Sun’s surface, often forewarned by sunspots, and when they’re aimed at Earth, they can cause geomagnetic storms that can disrupt radio communications and power line transmissions.
According to forecasters, a colossal solar storm was actually jamming radio and radar communications, instead of human interference.
The planes remained on the ground and the U.S. avoided a potential nuclear weapons exchange with the Soviet Union, researchers added.
“This is what we would characterize as a really near miss”, lead author Delores Knipp, the former Air Force officer and space weather physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Gizmodo.
Knipp says the solar storm is a classic example of how space research and geoscience are crucial to national security. “This was a lesson learned in how important it is to be prepared”.
But luckily, the US military had been researching solar activity and space weather – and its effects of the magnetic field on technology – for almost a decade.
Sunspots – dark, relatively cool areas on the sun’s surface – serve as launching pads for powerful bursts of high-energy radiation known as solar flares, as well as eruptions of solar plasma called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which nearly always accompany strong flares. So what happened? Solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) – a joint U.S.
NORAD is a joint organization between the USA and Canada that controls and defends airspace above the entire continent of North America.
Because of science. Better said, because of a group of pioneering scientists like Retired Colonel Arnold L. Snyder who was on duty that day at NORAD’s Solar Forecast Center.
By 23 May 1967, researchers were watching the Sun’s activity daily, and saw a flare big enough to be visible to the naked eye.
Colorado and New Mexico observatories saw a flare visible in the naked eye while a MA radio observatory reported that the sun was spitting out unprecedented levels of radio waves. A NORAD bulletin forecasted that a significant worldwide geomagnetic storm would take place within 36 to 48 hours.
As the solar flare event actually occurred on May 23, it jammed radars at all three Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) sites in the far Northern Hemisphere, which were created to detect incoming Soviet missiles, according to researchers.
An attack on these stations, would have been considered an act of war.
“I specifically recall responding with excitement, ‘Yes, half the Sun has blown away, ‘ and then related the event details in a calmer, more quantitative way, “said Snyder”.
This further suggested that the radars were being blocked by the sun, and not the Soviet Union.
“Such an intense, never-before-observed solar radio burst was interpreted as jamming”, the study authors wrote. She added that the solar storm is a classic example of how space research and geoscience are very much essential to US national security.
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Nearly 50 years later, we’re only just hearing about the full extraordinary series of events, thanks to a new report in the journal Space Weather.
