AskReaders: What is the most unsettling declassified information available to us today?

21-25 Declassified Information Available To Us

21. There actually were chemical weapons found in Iraq during the first and second gulf war which resulted in Saddam’s execution. The government was too embarrassed to admit it at the time because it helped in the production of those chemical weapons.

22. The U.S Army SL-1 nuclear accident. The SL-1 was a low-power test reactor in Idaho. They shut the reactor down for the holidays. On January 3, 1961, three guys went in to power it back up after coming back from vacation. Part of the start-up required they re-connect the control rods to the mechanism that raises and lowers them in the pile. To do this, they needed to “manually” raise the rods a few inches (read: grab the rod assembly by hand and lift it). For some reason which isn’t clear, the reactor operator who was lifting one of the rods, suddenly lifted one of them almost two feet too far, probably because it was stuck and he was prying pulling hard on it and it broke free. This caused the reactor to immediately go critical and super heat the coolant water, causing a steam explosion and blasting the shield plugs out of the top of the reactor. Also not clear is why the shift supervisor was standing on top of the reactor at the time. He was found impaled by one of the shield plugs in the concrete ceiling of the reactor room. The explosion killed the operator instantly. The third participant survived the blast and was found in the reactor room by rescuers, but later succumbed to his injuries. The reactor melted down. The site was buried and abandoned.

23. One of my favorites is how close the world came to WWIII because of Israel in the Yum Kippur war. The story goes that Arab forces were overwhelming Israel and so the prime minister of Israel called Nixon and told him that they needed to be sent supplies to help fight back the Arab forces.

Nixon didn’t want to get involved and declined. The Israeli prime minister explained to Nixon that if Israel’s capital was overrun he would have to enact the Samson Option. The prime minister explained that she had several planes on the runway with many nuclear bombs attached and the second the government fell the last orders would be to send the bombers off to drop their payload over every border country around them, destroying themselves and everything in the middle east (much like the story Samson in the bible who brought the colosseum down upon himself and his enemies). Nixon had the supplies sent out. Here is the Wikipedia Article.

24. Project Azorian is a pretty awesome tale. In 1968 Soviet submarine K-129 sank in the Pacific, and the Russkis didn’t know where it went down. The US did know, so the CIA launched Project Azorian to recover it from the seabed. The CIA was so wrapped up in the cool buzz of recovering a complete Russian submarine that they lost focus of what was important for intelligence purposes. The vast majority of a submarine is uninteresting steel. They probably could have recovered important pieces – missile cones and the like – without bothering with the rest of the hull.

You also have to remember that K-129 imploded and then fell a distance of 3 miles straight down to the seafloor. I believe it was estimated to have impacted the seafloor at something like 100 MPH.

So you have the CIA who want to raise an enormous, heavy, seriously damaged hull from 3 miles deep in the ocean. This required a project of massive proportions, took huge amounts of money and took so much time that by the time the project ultimately failed 7 years later (the submarine broke upon being lifted) the material was so outdated that it had minimal intelligence value.

On the whole, Project Azorian is a case study in being blinded with pushing the envelope of the possible at the expense of doing what makes sense.

25. Maybe Hitler fled to Argentina on a U-boat submarine and was spotted by an FBI agent along with other top officials. Personally this one seems the most interesting out of all the things here. He reportedly died in 1965. What makes this even more possible is the fact that the remains of Hitler that are in Russian possession were recently tested and found to actually belong to a woman.