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THIRTEEN TERRIBLY CLOSE CALLS WITH NUCLEAR WEAPON ACCIDENTS

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive devices ever devised by human beings. By conservative estimates from ArmsControl.org and the Federation of American Scientists, there are 12,685 known nuclear warheads in the world’s arms inventory—probably far more. Although there’ve only been two actual combat nuclear deployments in history, hundreds of test activations took place. No one truly knows how many near-miss incidents happened, but we do know of thirteen terribly close calls with nuclear weapon accidents.

By definition, a near-miss is a “narrowly avoided collision, discharge or other accident”. In nuclear weapon terms, that’d be closely avoiding unintentionally setting off an explosion—an explosion with unfathomable consequences. So how is it that people get so careless when handling an instrument of Armageddon? The answer seems to lie in human nature.

The world has eight countries with known nuclear arsenals. By alphabetical order, that’s China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Three more states have active nuclear weapon acquisition and development programs—Iran, North Korea, and Syria. There’s a lot of effort by “responsible” nuclear weapon powers to curtail the rogue countries before they become more of a menace.

Two international agreements regulate the world’s nuclear-equipped countries. One is the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. The other is the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of 1996. They divide the countries into three categories: Nuclear-Weapon States, Non-NPT Nuclear Weapons Possessors, and States of Immediate Proliferation Concern. According to ArmsControl.org, here’s where they fit and what they apparently have.

Nuclear Weapon States

  • China — 350 warheads
  • France — 290 warheads
  • Russia — 5977 warheads
  • United Kingdom — 225 warheads
  • United States — 5428 warheads

Non-NPT Nuclear Weapons Possessors

  • India — 160 warheads
  • Israel — 90 warheads
  • Pakistan — 165 warheads

States of Immediate Proliferation Concern

  • Iran — No confirmed warheads but in active development
  • North Korea — Known to possess but unknown quantity estimated at 20-30 warheads
  • Syria — No confirmed warheads but in active development

Incidentally, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited nuclear bombs upon the Soviet Union break-up. They returned their stockpiles to Russia, but it’s feared some nuclear devices are unaccounted for and open to terrorist possession. South Africa had a nuclear weapon program with active warheads, but they disbanded it. Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan also stopped their nuclear development programs.

Different Nuclear Weapon Types

Before getting into the thirteen terribly close calls with nuclear weapon accidents, it’s worth a review of what these weapons of mass destruction really are. Most people are aware that nuclear weapons arrived at the end of World War II when America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. These were first-generation devices. Little Boy was a uranium fission atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and Fat Man was a plutonium fission A-bomb that caused Nagasaki’s destruction.

Fat Man and Little Boy were basic A-bomb nuclear weapons that drew energy by splitting plutonium and uranium atoms through a fission process. They weren’t the tremendously-powerful thermonuclear hydrogen bombs that use a primary fission activation to cause nuclear fusion from hydrogen atoms. A fusion-activated H-Bomb uses a fission reaction to release massive energy contained in hydrogen gas.

The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were puny compared to today’s extremely energetic thermonuclear weapons. The Japanese destructors held a power equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT each. Thermonuclear bombs start at about 1/10 million tons of TNT and go up. This energy gets measured in the terms of kilotons (KT) which is 1,000 tons of TNT and megatons (MT) or 1 million TNT tons.

Today, a small-yield nuclear bomb such as a W76 battlefield tactical nuclear weapon would have a 100 KT explosive power. A larger-capacity B83 nuclear bomb would release 1.2 MT in power. Big or small, both designs are enormously destructive and would be devastating if discharged. It’s certainly nothing to risk having an accident with.

Nuclear Weapon Accidents — Broken Arrow

But, accidents do happen with nuclear weapons. They have, and likely will continue, as long as there’s a human element handling them. The United States military has a public record of accidents they’ve experienced with nuclear weapons.

It’s called Broken Arrow. Officially, Broken Arrow lists 32 specific incidents where American nuclear bomb handling went beyond safe handling parameters. Some speculate there are way more—possibly hundreds that haven’t been reported or, worse, covered up. Here are the “official” parameters a nuclear weapon incident/accident must have to make the Broken Arrow list.

  • Accidental or Unexplained Nuclear Detonation
  • Non-Nuclear Detonation or Burning a Nuclear Weapon
  • Radioactive Contamination
  • Nuclear Asset Lost or Misplaced in Transit
  • Jettison of Nuclear Weapon or Component
  • Public Hazard, Actual or Implied

The military loves its code words and phrases. They use Empty Quiver for having a nuclear bomb stolen from them. Dull Sword refers to minor nuclear arms incidents like a malfunctioning vehicle hauling a nuclear bomb. Faded Giant is a failing nuclear reactor. And NucFlash is an intentional or unintentional discharge that starts a nuclear war.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a watchdog keeping track of close calls with nuclear weapons. They say since the nuclear age started, political and military leaders faced a daunting challenge with their nuclear bomb program. They wanted it free of accidents but still wanted bombs immediately available when and if needed.

So how secure are nuclear weapons against accidental firings, incidental loss, and damage from careless root causes? Well, the good news, they say, is that there hasn’t been a single reported incident where a nuclear or thermonuclear bomb actually went off by accident. The bad news, they report, is there’ve been many, many close calls where accidents and errors nearly nuked us. Here are thirteen terribly close calls with nuclear weapon accidents.

Thirteen Terribly Close Calls With Nuclear Weapon Accidents

13. February 14, 1950 — A U.S. Air Force B-36 bomber en route from Alaska to Texas experienced catastrophic mechanical failure. Most of the crew parachuted out and survived, although the plane crashed and burned in the British Columbia coastal mountains. The one 1-MT Mark 4 nuclear bomb on board was jettisoned into the Pacific Ocean for safety sake. Despite a massive search, the operational nuclear warhead has never been recovered. It’s still out there, armed and waiting to go off.

12. March 11, 1958 — A U.S. Air Force B-47 Stratojet left Savanah, Georgia during a storm. It carried a 1-MT Mark 6 nuclear bomb, and the violent turbulence caused a crew member in the bomb bay to grab on for stability. He accidentally pulled the nuke’s emergency release pin which sent the bomb earthward. It landed at Mars Bluff in a children’s playhouse near three little kids. The bomb failed to detonate but caused a fire that burned down the family home. Fortunately, no one was injured although the children were stunned by the impact concussion.

11. May 22, 1957 — A U.S. Airforce B-36 bomber ran into bad weather over Albuquerque, New Mexico. It had a 10-MT Mark 17 hydrogen bomb in its bay that was accidentally released by a crew member who grabbed the bomb jettison lever to steady himself. The bomb hit the ground with enough force to leave a 12-foot deep by 25-foot wider crater in the desert sand. It didn’t blow up because the fissionable plutonium activator failed to activate. The official report noted that the Mark 17 was the largest nuclear bomb in the American arsenal.

10. March 10, 1956 — A U.S. Air Force B-47 left Florida for Morocco. Somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea, the plane simply vanished. It disappeared. There was no distress call, and no wreckage was ever found. In its bay was one 3.4 MT Mark 15 nuclear bomb as well as an undisclosed number of dismantled nuclear bomb parts. No sign of the plane, its nuclear bomb, or the spare parts ever surfaced.

9. September 19, 1980 — Near Damascus, Arkansas a military personnel working in a Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo dropped a wrench down the tube and damaged the fuel tank on a Titan II rocket. The leak caused an uncontrollable fire which destroyed the silo and its contents. On top of the Titan missile was a 9 MT W-53 nuclear warhead. It failed to go off but was burned beyond salvage. Should it have exploded, the blast may have set off a chain reaction blowing up 17 other nuclear bombs in the silo complex.

8. January 24, 1961 — A U.S. Strategic Command B-52 bomber experienced a mid-air collision while attempting to refuel with a KC-135 Flying Tanker near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Both jets broke apart and crashed. The B-52 held two 3.4 MT hydrogen bombs that jettisoned under parachute control. One chute failed and the bomb hit the ground at 700 mph. The other’s chute worked and let the bomb down slowly where it got hung up in a tree. Neither thermonuclear device exploded, but the investigation revealed the arming sequence actually activated on the second bomb that was stopped by the tree. It was only a simple switch with two little wires that prevented a major nuclear disaster.

7. July 27, 1956 — At Lakenhearth AFB in the United Kingdom, an American B-47 bomber on a touch-and-go training mission lost control. It plowed into a UK missile silo containing three 3 MT Mark 6 nuclear warheads. The silo, or “igloo” as it’s called, caught fire and burned. Once out, the investigation team found that the warheads were still operational and one bomb’s detonator had been sheared off in the impact. No one could clearly explain why it failed to go off as it should have.

6. January 17, 1966 — The Palomares Incident occurred when an American B-52 bomber had a mid-air collision with its fuel supplier over Palomares, Spain. Both crashed and burned, but the bomber made a controlled jettison of its four 1.5 MT hydrogen bombs. Two parachuted safely to the ground. One’s chute failed and its fission nuclear ignition device exploded. However, the actual fusion nuclear reaction didn’t happen. The preliminary fission nuclear blast caused massive radioactive pollution. The attempted cleanup effort was enormous, and the site still radiates today. Searchers eventually recovered the fourth nuclear bomb from the sea after a long and expensive venture.

5. January 21, 1968  — Four 1.1 MT B23 thermonuclear hydrogen bombs were on board a U.S. B-52 when it caught fire near Thule AFB in Greenland. The situation was hopeless, so the crew set the plane on an autopilot descent towards the open ocean and then bailed out. Every crew member survived, but the bomber did something unexpected. With a mind of its own, it crash-landed itself on the Greenland ice causing the primary fission nuclear ignition material to explode. The main warheads didn’t follow suit. However, the radioactive contamination from the small nuke blasts caused an environmental nightmare for the Greenland area. One investigator said, “It was like four dirty bombs went off.”

4. August 29, 2007 — Although no damage was done, this is likely the most embarrassing nuclear accident the United States Air Force ever experienced. They lost six live AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles equipped with W80-1 variable-yield nuclear warheads for a 36-hour period. Yes, they lost them. The bombs got mistakenly loaded at Minot AFB in North Dakota for transport to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

These six thermonuclear hydrogen bombs were wrongly taken from a stockpile that were live rather than the decommissioned ones that were supposed to be the day’s cargo. The unguarded nukes sat on a runway all night and then arrived in Louisiana where the ground crew treated them like duds. This SNAFU caused heads to roll right up to the Secretary of Defense because of lax nuclear bomb safety policies.

3. October 03, 1986 — The Russians aren’t without their nuclear bomb accidents. However, they’re usually very tight-lipped so who knows how many they’ve had. This one was impossible to conceal as they rescued their sailors from the Russian K-219 nuclear-powered attack submarine. The sub was near Bermuda when a hatch cover failed. Water leaked in and mixed with nuclear-grade fuel which is not a good thing. Despite all efforts to save the ship, most of the crew was saved.

The submarine fared otherwise. It was put under tow by a Russian freight and taken towards the motherland. Once over very deep water in the mid-Atlantic, the sub broke free and went 18,000 feet to the bottom. With it were two nuclear reactors and 34 operational nuclear-tipped missiles. None of them have been recovered.

2. March 01, 1954 — Not all nuclear accidents come from near misses. This one came from a live and planned thermonuclear hydrogen bomb test the Americans pulled off at remote Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. This was in nuclear bomb research infancy, and the United States military was going for the biggest and best bomb they could build. This day, they tested a project called Castle Bravo which engineers designed for a five MT yield. Somehow, they miscalculated.

The controlled blast was at least three times the expected force—somewhere between 15 and 20 MT. Observers placed outside the expected danger zone were radiated like they’d entered a blast furnace. Twenty-three pour souls on a Japanese fishing boat perished immediately with hundreds of native dwellers on nearby atolls consequently dying of radiation poisoning. Some were children who played in white fallout ash which they thought was this thing called snow.

The radioactive area was enormous. One analyst stated, “If ground zero had of been Washington, DC every resident in the greater Washington-Baltimore would have been instantly dead. Even in Philadelphia, 150 miles away, the majority of inhabitants would have died within an hour from radiation poisoning. In New York City, half the population would be dead by nightfall. And, all the way to the Canadian border inhabitants would be exposed to lethal radiation.”

1. October 30, 1961— Leave it to the Russians to do something really big and radically brazen. They built a gigantic thermonuclear hydrogen bomb—a magnificently monstrous bomb. They called it Tsar Bomba but used the creative code-name Ivan. This was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever made. However, it doesn’t appear they intended Ivan to be this large.

Soviet RDS-202 Tsar Bomba was 26 feet long and 7 feet wide. Ivan’s static weight was 27 tons, and it needed a specially-modified Tu-95 bomber to carry it. The Russian crew detonated Ivan on a deserted island far in the barren north. The area was mostly uninhabited by Siberian terms which seemed like a good place for destructive nuclear testing.

The Russian military, being the secretive bunch they are, never declassified the intended design yield they built into Tsar Bomba. It certainly wasn’t the 57 MT thermonuclear explosion that ensued. This bang was so big that the flash was seen for 630 miles distant. The mushroom cloud extended 40 miles up and spread out hundreds of miles with radiation spreading over multi-thousands of square miles. Windows 560 miles away blew out from the concussion.

Western observers monitored the Tsar Bomba blast and confirmed the energy. They equated Tsar Bomba as using more energy than all the munitions expended by all sides during World War II. That included the nukes on Japan. There are no verified records of how much environmental damage Tsar Bomba accomplished or how many people perished in its aftermath.

The Future of Nuclear Weapon Accidents

It’s naïve to think the world will rid itself of nuclear weapons any time in the foreseeable future. The NPT countries continue to cooperate in reducing their nuclear inventories—within their parameters of trust. Many monitoring protocols keep participating countries “honest”, but it’s the non-NPT nuclear weapons possessors and the immediate proliferation countries that present a high risk for accidents—never mind using a nuke with intention.

Allowing irresponsible, belligerent countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran to possess nuclear weapons is a serious mistake. It’s an unacceptable threat. It’s not just their instability in aggressively firing the first nuclear shot. It’s the chance they’ll make a terrible error and inadvertently activate a bomb.

The “responsible” nuclear community avoided intentional thermonuclear bomb-throwing since the lesson learned at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus the close call in Cuba. But they, too, still haven’t got the safety memo. As long as there’s human involvement with nuclear weapons, there’ll always be a potential accident.

It’s human nature to be careless with things like instruments of Armageddon. But, close calls with nuclear weapon accidents have terrible consequences. Just think of the innocent atoll kids who played in the snow.

WERE YOU—A HUMAN BEING—DESIGNED BY A HIGHER INTELLIGENCE?

I never came away from an autopsy without a scientific, and somewhat spiritual, reflection on the human body’s phenomenal design. I don’t know how many autopsies I attended over the years as a cop and a coroner. Lots. It’s not something you score. But I always looked at postmortems as a scientific—almost spiritual—systematic exercise in examining the intelligence behind human design.

There are twelve major systems in your anatomy—all interlinked to ensure your survival. Remove any system (except your reproductive one) and you’ll die. And these systems go about their intermingling business—day after day—year after year—without you having to consciously think about operating them.

Think about it.

All that’s required to live is fuel plus a bit of maintenance and, when things go wrong, modern medical science usually knows how to patch you up. Today’s practitioners can replace your organs, your limbs and joints, your hair, your eyes, your nose, and your teeth.

But what modern science and medicine doesn’t know is how all this came to be. What force of nature—call it a higher intelligence or infinite intelligence—laid the laws that result in you, a conscious human being, to exist and function?

I recently read a riveting paper written by William  A. Dembski, of the Access Research Network titled Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information. The intelligent design, or ID, idea has been around since the ancient Greeks, who did some deep thinking about where they came from and where they were going.

Some of intelligent design was explained by mythology, some by theology, and some by analogy. But the central question—did some intelligent being or force intentionally design you—remains unanswered today. Or did you just randomly happen through eons of evolution?

Personally, I believe there’s a unified source of infinite intelligence—a first cause—that guides evolution. A force we’re not capable of truly understanding, comprehending, or explaining. But still, a force that allowed our design and encouraged it.

Design theory—also called design or the design argument—is the view that nature’s entirety shows tangible signs of being designed by a pre-existing intelligence.

The most famous version of the design argument is found in the work of theologian William Paley who, in 1802, proposed his watchmaker analogy. His reasoning went like this:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. … But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think the answer which I had before given would be sufficient.

To the contrary, the fine coordination of all the watch parts would force us to conclude that it must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for some purpose. We’d struggle to comprehend its construction and designed its use, just as we’ve struggled to understand ourselves.

Paley argued we can draw the same conclusion about many anatomical objects, such as the eye. Just as a watch’s parts are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of telling time, the parts of an eye are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of seeing and relaying information to the brain that processes it and relays it back for the body’s welfare. In each case, Paley argued, we discern the marks of an intelligent designer.

Although Paley’s basic notion was sound and influenced thinkers for decades, Paley never provided a rigorous standard for detecting design in nature. Detecting design depended on such vague standards as being able to discern an object’s “purpose.” Moreover, Paley and other “natural theologians” tried to reason from the facts of nature to the existence of a wise and benevolent God. They tried to prove God from the perception of perfect products.

All of these things made design an easy target for Charles Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution.

Whereas Paley saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness. Although Darwin had once been an admirer of Paley, Darwin’s own observations and experiences—especially the cruel, lingering death of his 9-year-old daughter Annie in 1850—that destroyed whatever belief he had in a just and moral universe.

Following Darwin’s widely accepted theory of evolution, the notion of design was all but banished from biology.

Since the 1980s, however, advances in biology have convinced a new generation of scholars that Darwin’s theory was inadequate to account for the sheer complexity of living things. These scholars—chemists, biologists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science—began to reconsider design theory. They formulated a new view of design that avoids the pitfalls of previous versions.

Called intelligent design (ID), to distinguish it from earlier versions of design theory (as well as from the naturalistic use of the term design), this new approach is more modest than its predecessors. Rather than trying to infer God’s existence or character from the natural world, it simply claims that “intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable.”

Like I said, I never came away from an autopsy without a scientific, and somewhat spiritual, reflection on the human body’s phenomenal design.

What do you think?

Were you—a human being—designed by a higher intelligence?

Or did you just randomly happen?

THEODORE (TED) KACZYNSKI — WHAT MADE THE UNABOMBER TICK

Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski is a former math professor turned American domestic terrorist— the Unabomber—who’s serving life without parole for murdering three random people and injuring twenty-three others in a series of explosions. Kaczynski’s reign of terror lasted seventeen years from 1978 to 1995. During that time, the FBI conducted their lengthiest and most expensive investigation ever undertaken. The case is long closed, but a lingering question remains. Why’d he do it? What made the Unabomber tick?

Ted Kaczynski got his Unabomber tag long before he was caught. It developed through law enforcement and mainstream media because his victims were primarily associated with UNiversities and Airlines, hence UNA bomber. The name caught on and is still solely associated with Kaczynski today.

Before going into the Unabomber’s modus operandi, series of crimes, and how he was identified, it’s necessary to know who this man was. That’s the key to rationalizing his motive. It’s also necessary to know this man was not insane. No. Far from it. Actually, Kaczynski was a far-sighted genius.

Let’s look at what made the Unabomber tick.

Ted Kaczynski was born near Chicago in 1942 which makes him eighty today. His parents were working-class Polish Americans who provided a stable home for Ted and his younger brother, David. Early on, his family noticed a brilliance shining in Ted which also caught his teachers’ attention.

Academics came easy for Ted Kaczynski—especially mathematics. An early IQ test scored him at 167 which put Ted in the “highly gifted” category. He skipped grades in public school and entered Harvard University at age sixteen through a scholarship.

Peers and professors described Ted as “very intelligent but socially unprepared” for the campus. He was quiet, reserved, and not any source of trouble or rebelliousness. In 1962, at age twenty, Ted Kaczynski graduated with an advanced mathematics degree and a GPA of 4.12.

Ted Kaczynski went on to the University of Michigan where he earned his masters and doctorate in math. In 1967, his dissertation won the university’s top prize to which his doctoral adviser said it was the best he’d ever seen. It was so advanced, the advisor said, that perhaps only a dozen people in the country were equipped to understand it.

The University of California, Berkley, offered Ted Kaczynski a professor of mathematics role. He accepted it and, in 1968, he was given full tenure at Berkley. He was the youngest prof on the campus.

At this point in Ted Kaczynski’s life, his entire outlook changed. He became very disenchanted—disillusioned, embittered, or jaundiced, you could say—with “The System”. Without any explanation, he abruptly resigned on June 30, 1969, and moved back to his parent’s home.

Ted Kaczynski reconnected with his brother, David, and the two undertook a venture of building a 10-by-12-foot cabin in the secluded mountains near Lincoln, Montana. It was without power and water, but the isolation and discomfort suited Ted just fine. He lived off odd jobs and financial support from his family.

The Unabombings began nine years after Ted Kaczynski quit his university position and seven years after he became a Montana hermit. Here is a bombing timeline copied from the FBI’s Unabomber website:

May 25, 1978: A passerby found a package, addressed and stamped, in a parking lot at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. The package was returned to the person listed on the return address, Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist, Jr. He did not recognize the package and called campus security. The package exploded upon opening and injured the security officer.

May 9, 1979: A graduate student at Northwestern University is injured when he opened a box that looked like a present. It had been left in a room used by graduate students.

November 15, 1979: American Airlines Flight 444 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., fills with smoke after a bomb detonates in the luggage compartment. The plane lands safely, since the bomb did not work as intended. Several passengers suffer from smoke inhalation.

June 10, 1980: United Airlines President Percy Woods is injured when he opened a package holding a bomb encased in a book called Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson.

October 8, 1981: A bomb wrapped in brown paper and tied with string is discovered in the hallway of a building at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The bomb is safely detonated without causing injury.

May 5, 1982: A bomb sent to the head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University injures his secretary, after she opened it in his office.

July 2, 1982: A package bomb left in the break room of Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley explodes and injures an engineering professor.

May 15, 1985: Another bomb in Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley injures an engineering student.

June 13, 1985: A suspicious package sent to Boeing Fabrication Division in Washington is safely detonated, but most of the forensic evidence was lost.

November 15, 1985: A University of Michigan psychology professor and his assistant are injured when they opened a package containing a three-ring binder that had a bomb. The bomber included a letter asking the professor to review a student’s master thesis.

December 11, 1985: A bomb left in the parking lot of a Sacramento computer store kills the store’s owner.

February 20, 1987: Another bomb left in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City computer store severely injures the son of the store’s owner. A store employee sees the man leave the bomb, and that witness account helped a sketch artist create the composite sketch.

June 22, 1993: A geneticist at the University of California is injured after opening a package that exploded in his kitchen.

June 24, 1993: A prominent computer scientist from Yale University lost several fingers to a mailed bomb.

December 19, 1994: An advertising executive is killed by a package bomb sent to his New Jersey home.

April 24, 1995: A mailed bomb kills the president of the California Forestry Association in his Sacramento office.

———

The FBI formed a task force in 1979. It was jointly with the US Postal Service and the ATF. The force grew to over 150 full-time investigators, lasted seventeen years, and amassed millions of documents .

To say the investigators were stumped is an understatement. They had no idea who the Unabomber was, but they knew one thing. They were dealing with a genius.

The Unabomber deliberately constructed his devices from common and untraceable components. Further, he chose his targets randomly. There was no clear pattern to his victims except that they were linked to various universities and airlines.

The big break in the Unabomber case came in 1995. An anonymous person, claiming to be the Unabomber, sent a 35,000-word essay to the FBI. It was titled Industrial Society and Its Future. This manifesto, as the Unabomber called it, came with a clause. The Unabomber promised to stop his campaign of terror if his views on the ills of modern society were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The FBI Director and the US Attorney General made a tough decision. Despite an existing policy never to negotiate with terrorists, they agreed that by asking the Times and the Post to print the Unabomber’s piece someone would recognize the author.

The manifesto became public on September 19, 1995. Someone did recognize the Unabomber’s style—his brother, David Kaczynski. David contacted the FBI and gave them the tip. Ted Kaczynski became Unabomber suspect #2,416.

On April 3, 1996, the FBI raided the Unabomber’s tiny Montana cabin and arrested Ted Kaczynski. They found mountains of indisputable evidence. So much so that Ted Kaczynski confessed and pleaded guilty to all charges. He was sentenced to life without parole on January 22, 1998.

Psychiatrists did extensive interviews with Ted Kaczynski. Primarily, this was to establish if his mind state was suitable to understand due process and stand trial or if he was clinically psychotic. The shrinks said, clearly, that Ted Kaczynski was in full control of his faculties—in fact, highly intelligent and completely aware of what he’d done.

Struggling to figure him out, they classified Ted Kaczynski in a Psychiatric Competency Report (as per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM 4) as:

Axis I: Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, Episodic with Interepisode Residual Symptoms

Axis II: Paranoid Personality Disorder, with Avoidant and Antisocial Features

Nowhere in the 43-page report do they address a motive. That’s because they couldn’t find one. Neither could the courts, although motive is a non-necessary ingredient of establishing the burden of proof. Many armchair quarterbacks and internet sleuths have optioned opinions on why someone as bright as Ted Kaczynski would do something as crazy as Unibombing.

The answer is hiding in plain sight. Ted Kaczynski offers his motive up front in his 232-paragraph manifesto. Here are the opening quotes to help understand what made the Unabomber tick:

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE

INTRODUCTION

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as 2 unimportant. For practical reasons, we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM

Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.

But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)

Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the whole truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY

By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.

When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self- 3 esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “negro”, “oriental”, “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy”, “dude” or “fellow”. The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and insist on its replacement by “animal companion”. Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate”. They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures are inferior to ours. We merely point out the hyper sensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)

Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to upper-middle-class families.

Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. are inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)

Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may not be as strong and as capable as men.

Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They say they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he grudgingly admits that they exist; whereas he enthusiastically points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

Words like “self-confidence”, “self-reliance”, “initiative”, “enterprise”, “optimism”, etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, procollectivist. He wants society to solve every one’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in 4 his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, and objective reality, and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.

The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior.1 But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.

Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they prefer masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive 5 to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to invent problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.

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Theodore Kaczynski goes on for another 209 paragraphs but, by now, he’s made his point. He’s warning the world of the irresponsible and elite, progressive liberal movement—the Wokes—the counter & cancel culture we now see wrestling their own paranoid,  non-acceptable of other viewpoints, Wokeism chokehold on political and academic power—meaning their ideologic, counter-right, non-common-sense agendas. Ted Kaczynski saw this in 1995, but he had no platform like today’s social media he’d had to get out his message. His only venue was through mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

By setting himself up with the notoriety he created through the Unabomber persona, Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski achieved his goal and his manifesto lives on forever, easily obtained through the internet.

That’s what made the Unabomber tick.