Bermuda and Cold War Strategy

Now it has been revealed that the Pentagon probably deployed submarine-killing thermo-nuclear depth bombs on the island of Burmuda, according to recently declassified 1970 US documents.

"Submarine-launched Soviet ballistic missiles fired from the Bermuda area would have taken only about 16 minutes to strike military and civilian targets along the US East Coast. Soviet submarines were not withdrawn from the Bermuda "patrol box" until the late 1980s. As late as 1987 the Soviet Union engaged in a large-scale submarine exercise near Bermuda involving five vessels which were among the quietest submarines in the Soviet arsenal.

The Soviet submarines were so quiet and difficult to detect that nuclear depth bombs dropped from P3-Orion patrol aircraft flying out of Bermuda were thought to be the only assured way of destroying the vessels in the event of the Cold War turning hot."

Dr. Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser to the Nixon White House was involved in secret diplomacy with Brittain to deploy thermo-nuclear weapons in Bermuda. The Brits required existing consultation arrangements extended to cover Bermuda. "By the 1970s, with the Lulu nuclear depth bomb long retired, the Anti-Submarine Warfare weapon deployed in Bermuda would have been the B57 whose explosive yield ranging from 5 to 20 kilotons," said Dr. William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive project of Washington's Georgetown University, who has studied the declassified documents.

In October, 1986 the Yankee class K-219 got into trouble east of Bermuda with smoke and steam spilling from one of its missile tubes, according to a US P-3 Orion patrol aircraft flying out from the Bermuda US Naval Air Station. On October 6 the K-219 sank, four crewmembers died. The official cause of the explosion remains unknown.

(All emphasis above added by Vigilis. Full article appears at link in first paragraph).

posted by Vigilis @ 5:32 PM