Domodedovo International Airport

Moscow, Russia

Autumn 2005

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The A380’s 20-wheel main landing gear touched down first, followed in ten seconds by the nose wheels, as the jet that resembled a beluga whale settled it’s 600-ton bulk on the tarmac, still hurtling on at a nippy 220 knots.

Almost immediately, the reverse thrusters on the two in-board engines came on, muffling the diminishing whine of the two out-board turbines that had shut down. The sudden drag brought the large airliner to a halt, 50 metres short of the white stenciled outer markers at the end of the four km long runway.

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52yr old Captain Tuz Strassner, ‘Ace’ to his crew, is in command of the giant jet tonight. Ace also happens to be the direct translation in English, of the Russian word ‘Tuz’. Why the Russian reference? Because Tuz was born in the medical hut of a Soviet strategic bomber base in an obscure town called Dnipro in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

There are still a good two hours to go before Tuz can have his hot shower and martini. An hour of briefing to the relief crew who will be taking over for the remaining leg – Moscow to Hong Kong. Another hour because his employers, Lufthansa, had messaged that the Airbus Service Rep at the Domodedovo would like a quick inspection of the on-board systems and fuel status and ask him questions on the overall flight performance, a procedure not uncommon for aircraft that are still within five years of introduction.

Strassner will have to turn in as soon as he checks into the Ramada Domodedovo. He has a fair amount of domestic travel scheduled for the next four days, which Lufthansa hadn’t hesitated to sanction, given the prestige involved.

More precisely, it will begin with a dawn flight in a Russian Air Force IL-76 to the eastern Ukrainian town of Dnipro, 900kms to the south. As a courtesy that is shown to a fellow pilot – and in this specific case, a show of respect – Strassner will be traveling in the cockpit jump seat.

During the next three days, Tuz Strassner will witness the exhuming of the remains of a woman at the Kraznopil’s’ke Cemetery in Dnipro and its transportation for re-interment at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. She will be the only woman ever to receive such an honor. The re-interment will be preceded by a lavish medal ceremony, right next to the grave itself, where the woman will be bestowed posthumously, the nation’s highest military honor, Hero of the Russian Federation, by the hands of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, himself. Later that evening, at a banquet in her memory, Capt. Tuz Strassner will be the guest of honor, seated at the same table as President Putin.

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Tuz Strassner has never really met the woman being honored, having been prematurely extricated from her womb in the waning moments of her life. To be precise, an hour after she had belly landed her Tupolev-16 Badger, one bone-chilling May afternoon in 1960. The woman had been test-flying a newer version, the Tu-16KSR-2, a high-altitude launch platform for future strategic warheads. The TU-16 usually has a crew of six, but that day, there were only two.

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Unbeknownst to the woman, approximately an hour prior, another aircraft had taken to the skies, this one from the US Air Force base at Badaber, outside Peshawar, in Pakistan.

Painted jet black with a non-reflective varnish, with no windows or markings to distinguish it, the grotesquely long and ungainly plane resembled a reluctant albatross with a very long wingspan. The plane climbed rapidly and within twenty minutes, it had crossed into Soviet air space at an altitude of 65000ft.

The Badger meanwhile completed it’s test parameters and was returning to base, a remote hub for strategic bombers in Soviet Ukrainian town of Dnipro, when it was directed to intercept the pencil-like sliver of an aircraft that was traversing Soviet airspace at 65000 ft and to bring it down with the Tupolev’s onboard KSR-2 missiles or it’s 23mm cannons.

However, when it became known that the Tu-16 was on a test flight and was not carrying any ordnance, she was directed to try and ram the intruder which she, after a quick tête-à-tête with her co-pilot, proceeded to do, knowing full well that they wouldn’t survive the collision.

The Tu-16’s newly extended service ceiling was just about 65000 ft, but that afternoon the woman couldn’t get it up beyond 59000ft.

As the Tu-16 began its tortured climb, word came over the radio that the intruding aircraft had been brought down, by a barrage of newly developed ground based Dvina missiles and the world woke up to the news that the pilot, a 31yr old American by the name of Francis Gary Powers, had bailed out and was captured alive. Later, after 2 years in a Soviet prison, Powers was exchanged for Rudolf Abel, a British-born Russian KGB agent, incarcerated in the US for being involved in the “Hollow nickel case”. Abel had been nabbed with a hollowed out ‘nickel’ (5c coin) with a tiny coded message inside.

The plane Powers had been flying was a U-2, an unarmed, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, developed by the American defense contractor, Lockheed. It was owned and operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The plane was not designed for combat and carried no munitions, because at that time the Americans believed that no Soviet aircraft or ordnance was capable of intercepting it at 65000 ft.

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As to the Badger, the stresses generated by the effort to attain the intercept altitude nearly tore it apart. The window on the far side of the young co-pilot, Leutnant Yuri Gorshkov, exploded from the pressure differential. Next, his seat belt tore off from the pull as he got squeezed and sucked through the jagged opening like a sausage, his screams choked by the -65degree celsius whiplash of the wind. All the hydraulics systems failed simultaneously thereafter, literally shutting down rudder and landing gear control. Fortunately the elevators still had mechanical override.

The woman, her temperament cooler than the icy environs of the cockpit, single handedly managed to bring the massive bomber down from the edge of the stratosphere and coasted it in, gently setting it down on it’s belly at Dnipro air base. She remained strapped in her seat while the plane hurtled down the tunnel of runway lights, out of control, slipping and sliding over the ice-slick tarmac. Swirls of stinging ice pellets whipped up from the tarmac, whistled in through the blown window and swished around the cockpit. The big jet plowed through a radar shack and came to rest just feet away from a massive canal, it’s surface frozen but unstable from the spring thaw.

The woman sat slumped forward, motionless, as if peering down at something on the floor between her feet. It was her helmet, split in two. A small lead lined unit, situated just behind her seat, containing flight test-related instrumentation, had come loose in the impact and telescoped into her helmet with such force that the helmet had cracked open like a walnut and the lead lining of the box had smashed into her medula oblongata, crushing the back of her skull, the jolt breaking her neck at the same time.

That evening, the base hospital records showed the birth by Caesarian section of a sickly underweight boy. The baby was immediately stuffed into an incubator. The mother, who had by then succumbed to her injuries, was well known around the base.

The base personnel draped her ribbons and medals on top of her casket and there they lay, almost completely covering the lid, so extensive had been her accomplishments. Of these, the Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star, Order of the Patriotic War were clearly visible. As a mark of respect, the base personnel began calling the baby, “Tuz”.

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During a brief period of three and a half years, between 1942 and 1945, the woman had been known in the skies above the Eastern Front, by her call sign – ‘Belaya Roza’.

I thought that the Final Part was too abrupt. Y’see, I am not a trained writer and my mind scatters, like neutrons from an initiator.

Don’t know what an initiator is? I understand. You cannot be expected to know everything I know. 😋

An initiator kick-starts a nuclear chain reaction by emitting a blizzard of neutrons which then hit a soccer ball sized lump of Uranium-235, inside an atom bomb. You know what happens then of course.

I decided to insert another part between Part-2 and the Final Part, in order to make more sense.

So here it is…….

Ilushin-76 Transport

Russian Air Forces

2005

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It was the easy camaraderie inside the cockpit of the giant IL-76 transport that struck the American. Two aviators who, till a little over a decade ago, wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch together, now sitting inside an aircraft, one escorting the other to a ceremony. Time changes everything.

The emotion of the moment rushed at Tuz Strassner, ex-Colonel, US Strategic Air Command, ex-Commander-B2 (Spirit) Stealth Strategic Bomber. Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. Active service in Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And currently – off-duty Lufthansa Captain. Commander – A380.

The Ilushin had climbed steadily up to 39000ft and leveled off. Brigadier Arkady Prokopiev, in command, sitting ahead to Tuz’s left, cleared his throat and flicked the talk button,”Migalovo Center, India Lima Seven Six Tango, approaching Luhansk center. Request permission to descend to flight level one nine zero.”

“India Lulu Seven Six Tango, descend to flight level one nine zero, report and hold. You will have Luhansk center from here in a minute, at five seven two point one, repeat, five seven two point one. Have a nice flight. Over.”

“Khorosho”. The huge transport imperceptibly dipped it’s nose till it leveled off at 19000ft.

Clear of static, the short communication was a practiced and casual drawl, while remaining at the same time, clear and very specific. Between two highly trained, alert men in uniform, one on the ground at the 6955th Aviation Base at Migalovo, 50kms north of Moscow and the other, 8 miles above Ukraine hurtling south at Mach .80. To Strassner listening in, such ebb and flow of radio traffic was familiar, barring the accents of course.

The whistle of the four massive PS-90 turbofans was muffled and Tuz had tuned them out of his hearing pretty soon. The air was turbulence-free. Early mornings, the surface of the earth is cool and so are the layers of the atmosphere touching it. Cooler air has less turbulence. This is something a regular flier experiences. Take an early morning flight and you can be sure it will be a calm ride. Do the same thing in the afternoon and it’ll be bumpier.

Tuz gazed out the window. Here and there a few lily white wisps of cloud floated by, further above. Far to the east, the land was a barren white expanse, as far as the eye could see. Otherwise the sky was clear blue, visibility unlimited. All seemed right with the world.

Prokopiev pushed his seat back and accepted the mug of coffee that was passed to him by the young payload specialist, Gorky. The Commander gave Strassner a sideways glance, watching him bring his own mug up to his lips.

“So, what’s it like being a commercial pilot, Capt. Strassner?” The Brigadier wanted a conversation going.

“Call me Tuz, please. Flying an airliner? Well, here’s the truth. You don’t have as much time off as your neighbors think you have. You don’t make as much money as your relatives think you make and you don’t have as many girlfriends as your wife thinks you have. Still, I can’t believe they pay me to do this,” Strassner smiled.

Prokopiev let out a short bark of a laugh,” Pretty much the same with us. Except for the girlfriends.” The Russian winked and his slavic features spread in a wide grin. Start a Russian on women and he’ll go on and on, getting more vulgar by the second, even if he happens to be a Brigadier in the Air Force.

“But seriously,” Strassner picked up once again,” I’m constantly under pressure to carry less fuel than I’m comfortable with. Airlines are always looking at the bottom line and you burn fuel while carrying fuel. You hit a storm front and have to detour and suddenly you’re running out of gas and you have to divert to an alternate destination.” Prokopiev had turned in his seat and was listening intently.

Tuz Strassner continued, “The truth is, we’re exhausted. Our work rules mandate us to be on duty 16 hours without a break. That’s many more hours than a truck driver. And unlike a truck driver, who can pull over at the next truck stop, we can’t pull over at the next cloud.”

Prokopiev smiled at that and said, “Please, I am Arkady to you”. Then his expression turning grave, the Russian went on,” It is an honor to be here, to be a part of what is about to happen in the next two days”. The Russian was referring to the re-interment of Tuz Strassner’s mother from the Dnipro cemetery to the Kremlin Necropolis, followed by the awarding of the Hero of the Russian Federation medal to her, fifty two years after she was killed trying to land her crippled Tu-16 Badger in a desolate airfield in Dnipro.

“Thank you and I have to admit that these are my proudest days. I wish Dad was here to see this.”

The Brigadier had of course been briefed by the FSB about Strassner’s father. After the war, Luftwaffe Oberst Kurt Strassner had been captured by the Soviet forces but had managed to escape to the west before they’d had a chance to start pulling out his nails. He crossed the Baltic Sea in a freighter, disguised as a deckhand. Returning home to Konigsberg was not an option. The city had by then been depopulated in a brutal and swift ethnic cleansing drive by Stalin, the German citizenry either slaughtered or shipped off to Siberia, while Russians settled in and renamed the city ‘Kaliningrad’.

Once in West Germany, Strassner Senior wasted no time joining the nascent West German Air Force, the Luftwaffe Bundeswehr. In 1958, by then a decorated Brigadegeneral, Kurt Strassner was absorbed into the higher echelons of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND in short, the West German external intelligence agency that had been formed three years earlier. Then, in the spring of 1959, fate took Strassner to Moscow, to be posted in the West German High Commission as the senior military attaché.

It was at the 1959 May Day celebrations and the gala that evening at the Kremlin grounds that fate stepped in once again. Usually military attachés of foreign embassies were nearly always residents of their intelligence agencies and had KGB minders sticking real close and discreetly following their every move.

Brigadegeneral Kurt Strassner too had a KGB tag, Yuri Dudayev, who was his chauffeur and constant companion. KGB through and through, Yuri was still very likeable, a huge bear of a man with twinkling blue eyes, always ready with amusingly disparaging anecdotes about life inside communist Soviet Union. Strassner returned the easy amicability but knew enough to maintain a safe distance from the KGB staffer.

That evening Strassner had looked smashing in his full dress uniform. Pity he couldn’t put on his Second World War medals and gold sash, though he did not miss them at all. Jojo Strassner had never hankered after recognition.

And then fate stepped in, sweeping aside the Soviet paranoia. Even KGB agents gotta go when they gotta go. At the very moment that Yuri excused himself to go do a mocha (Russian for taking a pee), Strassner turned and bumped accidentally into a Soviet Air Force Colonel, a petite woman, immensely pretty even at 39, her uniform tunic bristling with decorations. Many of them, he immediately recognized as medals won during the Second World War, like the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Patriotic War, the Order of the Red Star and some others that he did not fully recognize.

There was something else about her, a defiance, from the way her nose turned up just a wee bit.

She was not one of the guests. She had been summoned to a meeting just prior and had been asked to remain for the gala. Her commanding officer, General Alexei Petrovich, must have decided in the last minute that she was entitled to some fun, given that she had just received transfer orders to the Strategic Long Range Bomber base at Dnipro, Ukraine. She would be leaving to take up her new assignment, flight testing the new Tu-16A (Badger), in a week.

Fate dealt another hand when Yuri, drunk, excused himself and went home and before the evening was over, Strassner would come to know Colonel Raisa Komarova more intimately than he had ever known another woman. Calling it a one-night stand would not be appropriate but it had to be that way, given that she was about to go off on her new posting, in an area which was out-of-bounds to all foreign nationals.

Kurt Strassner did not know it yet but it had taken seventeen years for him to finally come face to face with the pilot of the Yak-1 that had so terrorized the Luftwaffe over the Eastern Front – the ace who at the time went by the call sign…Belaya Roza.

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Jagdgeschwader52 (Luftwaffe Fighter Wing52),

Somewhere near Кривий Ріг (Kryvyi Rih),

Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,

1942-43

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I confess, I noticed something missing in this series – a Part-2. At my age it is easy to miss things. You can’t sue me, it’s my blog and I can do whatever I like. So here it is……

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By 1943, the Nazis began to realize that they no longer had the world by its hoden. In the east, Operation Barbarossa was turning into a disaster and in the west, the Hitler-Mussolini axis had lost control over North Africa and the Mediterranean. All over Europe partisans, trained by the Allies, were wreaking havoc on German railroads and bridges, turning logistics into a nightmare.

The Luftwaffe however still remained a formidable force in the skies over Europe. Newer and faster airplanes were being developed and tested at a frenetic pace, using technologies that were way ahead of anything that the Allies had. At the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (BFW – Bavarian Aircraft Works), the development of souped-up versions of the Messerschmitt bf 109 fighter was advancing rapidly, under it’s brilliant designer, Nazi sympathizer Wilhelm ‘Willy’ Messerschmitt.

German technological ingenuity was the engine and slave labor, the wheels.

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In 1943, there was no separate category called “test pilots”, neither were there any test pilot schools. The operational pilots were flying hundreds of sorties every day, buzzing around at speeds as slow as 100mph to dive speeds exceeding 500mph, along with ten to fifteen other aircraft, friend and foe, missing each other by inches.

And all that chaotic blur of speed usually happened inside a pocket-sized air space the size of just one city block.

The test conditions were right there and the fighters got tested in real time. Every pilot was a test pilot and flight data collection was just the pilot’s word of mouth in the debriefing, after.

It would be a decade and the war would be over before the first flight data recorder was installed in an aircraft.

At the JG52, a forward German air base 900kms west of Stalingrad, the number of Messerschmitt engineers and technicians almost equalled air force personnel. In the early days of Operation Barbarossa, they were regular attendees at pilot debriefings, especially the day Oberst Kurt Strassner inadvertantly performed the ‘Stall und Tauchen’ a dangerous, gravity-defying maneuver, aimed at getting behind an enemy fighter in a dog fight.

Decades later, Strassner’s aerobatics would become well known among jet fighter pilots as the Pugachev Cobra, named after Soviet test pilot, Victor Pugachev.

Here’s a YouTube video on how a Pugachev Cobra works. You pitch the jet’s nose up sharply, its belly facing forward, abruptly braking speed. Then, when you have fallen behind the enemy pilot who was chasing you, you straighten out and begin chasing him. Simple.

Actually no, not simple. The Pugachev Cobra needs a special kind of airframe design that can withstand the high G-forces of a sudden braking.

https://youtu.be/OCtmtUFXTMs?si=hDzST1VCbe2vZ48K

But lets not get ahead of ourselves…..

The period between 1914 and 1950 was the age of aerial ‘dogfights’, skirmishes in the air between enemy fighters. Anyone who has been a Biggles fan knows what a dogfight is.

If you were in a dogfight and you had a ‘hun’ on your tail, you would want to have him in front of you, instead of behind you, so that you could drill him full of holes with your wing mounted 23mm canons.

If you were unimaginative, you’d make a tight 360-degree turn to try to come up behind him, but the hun was not going to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs while you turned around. He was going to stick with you real close, so close that if you farted he would be able to smell it.

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Pardon the mention of farting. I took that from the Lawrence Sanders character, detective Edward X Delaney, exhorting a colleague to stick real close to a ‘perp’ he was following.

I go off-script sometimes but what are you going to do? It’s my blog.

Now, let’s get back to the yarn, shall we?

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The 360-degree turn you made to get behind the hun was only going to get you dizzy and not behind him.

But if you thought outside the box you’d do the Pugachev Cobra. To understand this one needs to first understand the Soviet ethos……..

With the advent of the jet age, fighter to fighter mid-air engagements (ie:dogfights) became passé, due to the high speeds and the heat seeking/laser guided smart ordnance that no longer needed sighting on cross-hairs. While the Americans understood this, somehow the Soviets never did and they kept building fighters with extremely high maneuverability, ideal for a Pugachev Cobra.

Remember the guy I mentioned earlier – Viktor Pugachev? He first performed the stunt at the Paris Air Show in 1989 in a Sukhoi-27 Flanker.

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Imagine you are a Russian test pilot and it is the 1970s, the Cold War is at its height. You are in a Sukhoi-27, approaching American air space somewhere over the Bering Strait. You are in complete radio silence with base.

The Aleutians West island chain swings into view over the horizon and suddenly you have company. Two American F18 Hornets have appeared as if by magic, on either side. They had launched off the 92600-ton, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, that is patrolling the northern waters, shepherding a sizable part of the US Pacific fleet, like a mother hen and her chicks.

The Hornet to your left lets loose around 250 rounds in a short burst from its nose-mounted 6-barrel 20mm rotary canon. The burst is not aimed at you. It is a warning, followed by the standard “You are violating American ADIZ, please turn around immediately.”

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An Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is a region of airspace in which a country tries to identify, locate and control approaching aircraft in the interest of its own national security. The ADIZ is declared unilaterally by that country and may extend beyond its territorial waters, to give the country more time to respond to possibly hostile intruder aircraft. 

The concept of an ADIZ is not defined in any international treaty and is not recognized by any international body. Any country can arbitrarily fix its own ADIZ.

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Back to the story….

You are unfazed by the burst from the Hornet’s nose mounted 20mm canon. You do not break radio silence.

To your right, in the distance, you can just manage to make out a gaggle of F-14 Tomcats, also from the Carl Vinson, keeping pace, making no move to get closer, confident that their cousins – the Hornets – will take care of you.

You don’t panic and yell to base. You continue to maintain radio silence. Your orders are pretty much carte blanche. It’s your play.

Next, the Hornet on your right sidles up close so you can see the pilot’s eyeballs. He waggles his wings. That’s the same as saying,” You don’t belong here, get the fuck out.”

You had expected the attention. Your incursion into US air space was not accidental and your mission was very specific – to test the Su-27’s super-maneuverability against a real adversary.

The Aleutians are now clearly discernible. You decide it is time to rock and roll, to give the two Americans some goose bumps.

You dive from 39000ft. You dive because, for what you are about to carry out, you need more air.

Normally, if you fall out of an airplane accidentally at 39000 ft, you’ll take 180 seconds (3 minutes, give or take) to hit the ground and look like a giant had just dropped a bowl of blender-mashed fruit salad in yoghurt all over the landscape.

But you are not falling out of a plane accidentally. You are in a highly maneuverable fighter jet and you are diving, your altimeter rapidly unspooling, your pressure suit keeping you from losing consciousness, untill you level off at 1000 ft.

The dive takes just 15 seconds.

At 1000 ft the Pacific seems a lighter blue and its expanse, endless. The Aleutians are no longer visible over the horizon. The dive has taken you over the speed of sound so when you level off, you throttle back to around 300knots.

Meanwhile, the F18s are still on your tail, their AIM-7 Sparrow missiles now armed and waiting to relish what they think will be a turkey shoot.

You don’t panic. This is the life you have chosen, to be a test pilot. This is a test and at the same time it is real. The F18’s canon burst is real and the American’s malice is real.

There you are now, level at 1000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. At that height the surface of the Pacific is a blur. Since such encounters never ever develop into hostilities, the Americans are simply tagging along, not fully prepared for what is about to happen.

All of a sudden, you break to 200knots. This is a necessary requirement that prevents your bird from breaking apart when you do the Cobra. Unprepared, the Yanks on either side rush up toward you, relative speeds closing the gap. You bring your elevators up full and pull up the nose sharply until your angle of attack has gone beyond even 90°, to about 110°. Momentum forces the Sukhoi to continue flying straight, it’s afterburners now slightly ahead of it’s nose. You hold this position for just a few seconds.

Before they can mouth the words ‘what the fuck..’ the two F18s whiz past and drive themselves into the sea, but not before the pilots have managed to bail out.

No worries, the pilots have the latest homing devices and will be picked up.

Meanwhile, your airspeed has been dropping, so you quickly level your elevators and throttle up, avoiding a stall. The nose falls back and the Sukhoi continues on it’s level flight, picking up speed and altitude as it goes. You turned around in a tight arc and get the hell out of the US ADIZ.

You switch on your radio, a chuckle now playing on your lips, the chuckle turning into a full-blown guffaw for the benefit of the seething Americans back on the Carl Vinson.

Barely able to contain your laughter, you shout into your mouthpiece,” U vas khoroshay den?” (Did you have a nice day?)

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Getting back to my WW2 story, dogfights were not always about speed and bravado. They were about guile and nerve. And those, Luftwaffe Oberst Kurt Strassner had oodles of.

In the age of aerial dogfights with piston-engined fighters, pilots were warned to recognize by sight, the aces of other side, by the call signs that were painted across their fuselages. If you happened to spot an ace in the pack, you had two choices. Cut and run for the cover or face the ace if you were an ace yourself.

Strassner had never run, even in the early days, when he hadn’t been an ace.

The Russian driving the Mig2 that had strayed into Strassner’s path however, was no ace. He was a 19 year old rookie, Igor Kinsky of the 73rd Air Force Guards Regiment. Given the inferior training and aircraft design of the Soviets in those early days of the war, young Igor had been told to not be a hero and beat it if he ever came across a German ace and in doing so, to live and fight another day. This he strove to do, soon as he recognized the Cobra sign under Strassner’s canopy.

Wearing a skull cap with shades developed by Messerschmitt, that were supposed to cut off glare from the sun completely, Strassner chased the young Igor’s Mig2 out over the Inhulets river. When he realized that the Messerschmitt was glued to his tail, the kid panicked. The Mig2 suddenly began a reckless dive from 18000ft, straight down at the blue waters below and Strassner gave immediate chase.

As the altimeter needle whirred down, Strassner realized he wasn’t alone. Neat staccato stitches suddenly appeared just above his right wing tip and the Me109 shuddered. A quick glance back up told him that he’d suddenly been joined by two Yak-1bs who had dropped out of the sun and were closing in on him. The so-called glare-proof goggles hadn’t helped after all. He hadn’t seen them, with the glare of the sun in the background.

When they had taken off earlier in the afternoon, the German wolf pack had four ‘schwarms’ of two ‘rotten’ each, sixteen planes in all. The Mig2 had drawn him way out and away from the main battle. Was he the patsy? Was it a trap, he wondered, but decided to go through with the chase anyway. At some point, he began wondering where his wingman, Dieter was, when the Yak that was following right behind, suddenly disintegrated in a spectacular blast leaving zero possibility of a bail-out.

Strassner hoped the second Yak would be destroyed by the debris, since it had been following close behind, but that was not to be. The second Yak was nimble and it had been so close behind that the ball of flame and splinters hadn’t had time to expand. A quick practised tug on the stick by the Soviet pilot and the second Yak had passed the explosion unscathed.

Dieter however didn’t survive the kill. His Messerschmitt had been behind the second Yak but not too close. It ran straight into the expanding debris cloud and blew itself apart, peppered by the lethal shrapnel from the first Yak, the ball of flame just growing bigger in size and blending into the bigger one left behind by the blown-up Yak.

Strassner was on his own now. Except for the nimble second Yak of course, which was keeping pace five hundred  yards directly behind and above. He knew he was moments away from being chewed into bits by the Russian’s 23mm Shvak canons and he had to think of something quick. The blue waters of the Inhulets were rushing up at him at 400knots and he had to bottom out at 1000ft.

The Yak, still hanging on, got ready to blast the Me109, now that both were flying level. It’s right cannon had just started to speak, when the Messershmitt did something strange. It lifted it’s nose up, so suddenly that the fighter was pointed almost vertically and maybe even a bit on the other side, on it’s back. It’s speed broke sharply as it almost flipped over, while continuing to fly level.

The Yak had just a second to dodge the suddenly slowed German. It flashed past and zoomed on ahead, pretty sure that the Me109 would stall and probably crash. The Yak kept going and did a curving loop, shooting up straight, but this time it had the Messershmitt on it’s tail and now the German looked like he was stuck on the Yak with glue.

A vast approaching cloud bank and a look at his fuel gauge made Strassner abandon the chase, drop down and skim across the waters back to base. He saw no further sign of the Yak but something told him that it was not the last he’d seen of Russian. The doggedness, the nimble dodging, the tight loop, these were all hallmarks of an ace.

But there had been something else. Something that had caught his eye as the Russian fighter had hurtled past him, not even 50 yards to his right.

Nestled within a large painted white rose, emblazoned against the Soviet-grey of fuselage just below the canopy, were the words ‘белая роза’ (‘Belaya Roza’)

In Russian, it meant “White Rose”.

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Kraznyi Luch Soviet Air Force Station,

Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,

July, 1942

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At first it was a small grey dot barely visible over the tops of the fuel reservoirs and the meteorology station situated a few hundred meters beyond the runway perimeter fence, where the slope up the hill began. Then, as it approached, growing perceptibly larger by the second, it did something that made the collective hearts of the personnel watching below, skip a beat.

Devouring 170 meters every second, the Yak turned up its nose and shot up almost vertically, till it leveled off at 12000 feet. It didn’t dally there long and instead, the fighter flipped over on it’s back and began a dizzying nose dive aimed straight at the control tower, screeching down at near-sonic speed.

Time appeared to stand still for Staff Sargent Yuri Jakobiev who was on his swivel chair in observation window of the tower, enjoying a cigarette. It had now plopped out of his mouth and burnt a hole through his tunic as he gaped up at the nose of the fighter which seemed to be bearing down on him directly.

Just a microsecond before it was going to hit the observation deck, the Yak did another funny thing. It pulled up sharply, a tortured scream emanating from it’s single Klimov V-12 engine as it effortlessly took the fighter out of the dive, leveling off with barely ten feet to spare above the asphalt.

The Yak-1b was perhaps one of only four really fearsome fighter aircraft of the Second World War. Named after its designer, Alexander Sergeevich Yakovlev, it was an extremely versatile single-seater.

The Yak was in exalted company, its contemporaries being the German Messerschmitt 109, the British Supermarine Spifire and the American P-51 Mustang, to none of which it came second. More maneuverable in tight spaces and better suited for dogfights, it was less technologically sophisticated but at the same time easy to maintain, especially during the harsh winters of Northern Europe.

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Having scared the bejesus out of everybody in the hangars, the fighter did a tight turn, throttled back and came skimming back over the treetops, to make a perfect touch-down, coming to a halt in front of a row of parked Yaks, the release of tension palpable as two mechanics ran toward it, wedge-like chocks in hand.

One of the mechanics attempted to place a small step ladder on wheels, next to the plane but the canopy popped opened with a loud snap and the pilot, still in his skull cap and goggles, climbed over and took a nimble leap on to the asphalt and began a skipping run toward the mess hall. As the mechanics shook their heads in mock exasperation, the pilot, in mid-sprint, took off the skull cap and flung it into the air. A mass of curly blonde hair spilled out onto the pilot’s shoulders.

Soviet Air Force Junior lieutenant, Raisa Komarova, waved back at the mechanics and raced into the squat building.

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The reason for the spring in her step was obvious. Lieutenant Komarova had just downed not one, but two Messerschmitts. While most of their compadres were escorting Ju88 formations to Stalingrad, those two had seemed like they were just tooling around on a ‘free hunt’. They disappeared inside a cloud bank and she went after them, nose to tail. They didn’t make it out of the cloud bank but she did.

When she emerged from the cloud bank, she immediately became aware that she was no longer alone. There were two others at her 10 o’clock, seemingly unaware of her presence, maybe because the sun was behind her. Seeing them was not a surprise. Soviet pilots were well aware of the deadly Messershmitt “schwarms” – wolf packs that roamed the skies in tight packs of four 109s, two leaders and two wingmen.

She throttled the Yak forward till she was level with them, a bit to the rear on the right, just 50 meters, wingtip to wingtip. On the fuselage of the near one, was a painted cobra. She had earlier been briefed to avoid cobra-head Messershmitt at all costs – its driver was an ace.

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An almost insane urge came over Jr. Lieutenant Komarova and instead of diving and getting the hell out of there, she stayed by their side for what seemed like an eternity. In the gathering gloom, she could clearly make out the outline of the cobra just below the canopy, frozen in place – it’s head reared back to strike.

She wondered why they didn’t try to come after her lone Yak, but another cloud bank was coming up ahead. Thumbing her nose had always been Raisa Komarova’s infuriating habit, ever since she first did it to her elder brother, Dmitri, when she was six. She raced the Yak just a wee bit ahead so the Germans would clearly see her, waggled her wings promiscuously and dived into another cloud bank that had appeared directly below. When she emerged, they were gone.

It was the 13th of July, 1942, the day when the Second World War got it’s first female fighter ace, at a small regimental airfield outside Kraznyi Luch, in south-eastern Ukraine.

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The fighter sat still on the tarmac, its canopy open. It had already flown two sorties that day and it would not be long before it was up in the air again. This machine was a little different from the 12 other Yaks that stood in the line-up on the asphalt.

Besides the two bright red stars on each side, just ahead of the elevators, the fighter had two words, painted in a flourish, white on grey, just below the canopy. It was the pilot’s call sign – “Belaya Roza”.

In Russian the words meant “White Rose”.

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There would be one more brush a month later between Belaya Roza and Cobra, both surviving the encounter.

Then, a decade after the guns in Europe fell silent – sometime in 1952 – Jr. Lieutenant Komarova, now Colonel Komarova of the Long-Range Aviation Division of the Soviet Strategic Air Forces, would come face to face with the Cobra, this time at a West German Embassy dinner. He would be introduced as General Kurt Strassner of the BND, the West German equivalent of the CIA.

When Strassner’s drunk KGB minder dozed off in the men’s cloak room, the Cobra would take the Rose by her hand into a closet, where they would mate, climaxing with a crescendo befitting Wagner’s ‘Gotterdamerung’.

Neither the Cobra, nor the White Rose would ever realize that they had met before – in the skies over war-torn eastern Ukraine. That closet in the West German Embassy would be the only time they would ever see of each other.

(Look out for Part-2)

“It is possible to make the public believe anything that we want them to believe” – Vannevar Bush, Scientific Advisor to US President Franklin D.Roosevelt, the first head of the Manhattan Project and the founder of the 5th largest defense contractor in the world, Raytheon.

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If one goes back to Aristotle’s time, the belief was that you could sit on a rock and just think and from merely thinking, understand how the universe works.

Thats right, you simply thought it all up, no need to experiment, to test your hypotheses. Maybe they did feel the need to experiment but didn’t have the means.

So, the way that the profound mysteries of the day were explained was by deep thinking.

For example, those ancient thinkers said that in space, light travelled through an invisible medium that they called “ether”. Believe it or not, the ether theory reigned until the early 20th Century, when it was finally discounted by Albert Einstein.

One of the beliefs that all pre-17th Century thinkers and scientists had was that humans were the only intelligent beings in the universe. But as theoretical physics expanded and the age of experimentation began along with research into life sciences, it became apparent that intelligent life could also have evolved elsewhere in the vastness of the universe.

Also growing with science was the conviction that we evolved randomly and not by some divine design. Take a look at how the human species came into being…..

65 million years ago, a random 100 km wide rock swung out of the Oort Cloud 186 billion miles away in a random direction, probably when another rock, an interstellar nomad, bumped into it.

Its path twisting and turning from the pushes and pulls from random planets, moons and asteroids that it passed by, our rock blundered on until it began threading its way between Jupiter and its humongous moon, Ganymede. That’s when the gravitational tug of war between the planet and its giant moon tore the rock apart into small pieces and a random 10 km wide fragment broke free and flew another 365 million miles in yet another random trajectory, until it ended its journey by slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula, randomly wiping out entire species and clearing the path for mammals (and ultimately us, sapiens) to get on top of the food chain.

Everything that has happened to us since then has been completely random.

Think of it for a moment. A random .277 round from a Sig Sauer CROSS zips across a highway in Srebenica at 3000ft/sec, goes over the fence of a park and hits a random baby in a stroller between the eyes during the height of the 1990s Balkans War. The round wasn’t intended for the boy. The sniper’s hand had simply shaken inadvertently while taking aim at his target, when a random beetle had crawled out of the woodwork and across his knuckle causing his finger to tighten on the trigger. The baby was just simply at a random place at a random time.

So was the rock that made our evolution possible – the random effect of a random event. No God involved. Like Aristotle, I simply sat thinking through this (with a Rickard’s Red in hand).

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The 17th Century Dutch astronomer, physicist and thinker, Christian Huygens, was studying the planet Jupiter when a thought came into his mind. He began drawing an analogy between Jupiter and Earth. He said Jupiter had an atmosphere, weather, rains and oceans and so it could have some form of life down there, like we do on earth.

Of course, life as we know it on earth cannot survive the 95% Hydrogen & Helium atmosphere on Jupiter. Huygens probably did too but he correctly surmised that just because we need oxygen, it doesn’t mean that other living beings elsewhere in the universe must also need oxygen. Here on earth itself there are many tiny organisms that do not need oxygen to survive, like anaerobic bacteria. For all we know, creatures on distant exo-planets may like to have crushed kryptonite smoothies and supercooled mercury and cobalt salads.

Within a span of 70 years after Einstein appeared, men were landing on the moon, until it got so mundane that folks stopped watching moon landings live on TV. It became like, “Harrison Schmidt who? Apollo17? Big deal. Golf anyone?”

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The Book of Genesis tries to tell us that we humans are one of a kind, created by God in his image. With the advent of 20th Century science however, it has become clear that we might not be unique.

If there is a God, he is throwing us little crumbs, a century at a time. One of those crumbs is the notion, entirely scientifically logical, that there may well be others in the universe, maybe physically not like us, but intelligent, with analytical abilities like us. Those extraterrestrials may even be a lot smarter and may have even visited us in the past.

Through the 20th Century and especially in the 1960s, there have been multiple instances where Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) were sighted and thought to be intelligent aliens from some distant planet.

Let’s start with a few early instances…..

The first account of a UFO sighting and the panic that followed was in August 1783, after two brothers, Joseph and Etien Montgolfier, secured financial sponsorship from the King of France to design and build something novel – a hot-air balloon. The sponsorship may have been the 18th Century equivalent of a modern-day no-bid defence contract.

During one of the initial test flights, the balloon was caught in a thunderstorm and it crashed in a tiny French village called Gonesse. The peasants there thought it was a monster attacking them from the sky. A watercolour from that period shows them with pitchforks and scythes, ripping the balloon to shreds. Women and children are shown running away, flailing their arms above their heads in panic.

It took a while for life to return to normal there. It became obvious that any new form of flight might seem like an archetypal attack from above.

Fast forward 150 years……

On Halloween eve in 1938, mass hysteria reigned for a while in the US state of New Jersey when CBS Radio broadcast a narration of the Victorian era H.G.Wells novel, “The war of the worlds”. The famed Hollywood actor, Orson Welles, was the narrator and many listeners became convinced that the world was really under attack from Martians who had landed on earth and were butchering millions.

Suddenly, a voice cut in, “We interrupt our program with some news that is very important. A strange meteor has crashed into farmland, near Grovers Mill.”

A reporter, claiming to be on the scene, delivered his report in a panicky voice…”It doesn’t look like a meteor at all. It is definitely artificial, kind of like a metallic cylinder!!”

“Oh my God, something is crawling out of the top! Extraterrestrials are wriggling out, like crabs out of a fisherman’s basket. They are as large as bears but with snake-like tentacles! Barns are catching fire and so are the gas tanks of parked cars!” The reporter sounded hysterical.

Listeners heard wails of panic and then, suddenly silence, suggesting that reporter was now dead. Next, a new voice broke in, introducing himself as the “Secretary of the Interior”…

“Citizens of the nation, I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation. Tens of thousands are dead, including our brave soldiers and aviators. New York City is under evacuation orders. Inter-planetary warfare has begun!!”

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Actually, the broadcast had begun with the narrator clearly stating that the story was science fiction, based on the H.G.Wells novel mentioned above. But not even a single listener appeared to have paid attention to the narrator. Millions across America actually believed it was real.

By now other radio stations all across the world began interrupting their broadcasts to announce the catastrophe unfolding. Soon the news, that Martians had arrived and were engaged in a wanton killing spree, had spread all over the world. Switchboards jammed. Hospitals began admitting thousands with anxiety and cardiac problems.

When the authorities realized it was a hoax and desperately tried to tamp down the panic, their efforts failed. This was the era of the Great Depression and anything that Government agencies said was met with complete distrust.

Across America, people loaded up their cars and fled. To many, it was the beginning of the end of the world. All through the night, in churches and synagogues, people prayed for deliverance.

The following morning, the New York Times carried a Page-1, above the fold, story….” Radio listeners in panic, taking war drama as fact…”

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) openned an investigation of CBS but backed out after a while, mentioning something about First Amendment rights. “The public does not want a spineless radio,” said the FCC Commissioner.

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The CBS broadcast had inadvertently tapped into the nation’s growing agitation. Just two weeks prior, Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, leaving the security of Europe in tatters.

Rapid advances in technology fuelled by the war – jet aircraft, radar, microwave, nuclear fission – left many depression-hit Americans overwhelmed by how science had affected their future peace and security.

Death rays and murderous Martians may have been pure science fiction in 1938 but fears of annihilation persisted. We humans have always been afraid of being taken by surprise, the sneak attack, something that became apparent at Pearl Harbour.

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The moment it hit the airwaves, the “War of the worlds” broadcast had a profound effect on the American military. To the military analysts listening in, what struck them was the scale of the emotional effect and pandemonium that the broadcast caused.

America’s military thinkers grew seriously concerned that an entire population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was actually true. Americans had let themselves be taken in by something that had been entirely made up.

Totalitarian regimes were known to manipulate their citizens with false news, but America? This mass ‘mind control’, though inadvertent, had never been seen before in America. In Washington, President Roosevelt’s top science advisor, Vannevar Bush, observed the radio broadcast with his Machiavellian eye. He saw an opportunity in the public’s tendency to be so easily swayed.

America was not the only nation that realized that its people could be influenced by something as trivial as a radio broadcast. Adolf Hitler took note as well. His daily broadcasts grew darker. He referred to the hysterical reaction of Americans in a Berlin speech, calling it the “corruption and decadence of democracy”.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin had also been paying attention. He immediately ordered his security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, Director of State Security(NKVD), to start work on mind control experimentation.

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YouTube has a real video of a magpie drinking from an upright bottle of water until the water level drops below the reach of its beak. It then does a curious thing, almost instinctively. It picks up a small pebble and drops it into the bottle, thereby raising the water level and making it possible for it to drink more. The bird continues the routine until its thirst is quenched.

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Every time we study animals, we realize that they are a lot smarter than we thought they were. Isn’t it therefore possible there are life forms that are way smarter than us? Maybe we aren’t “God’s chosen ones”, the BS that Christian evangelists would like to have us believe.

Maybe we really aren’t the hot shit that we think we are.

The 1960s were the age of UFOs and being abducted by aliens became the in thing. Conversations went somewhat like this….

“Oh, I was in my farm, mindin’ mah bizness pluckin’ strawbewwies when aliens swooped down in a great big sawsah and took me away. They then raped me willy nilly and after they had taken turns having their way with me, they dropped me back..”

“Didja take pichchurs?”

“Ah did, but the aliens took my camera away.”

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There are grainy monochromatic photos and film clips from the 1960s of strange crafts flitting this way and that, flying objects shaped like “tic-tacs”, with the ability to scoot and change direction at lightning speed. A number of US Navy pilots have come forward to claim that they had seen such objects.

The encounter in the YouTube video below happened much later (2004) (I couldn’t find a clip for the ‘60s)….

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Commander Fravor appeared before the US Congress (see video below) and gave his testimony of the sighting. Can you imagine something similar to a congressional hearing on UFOs happening anywhere else in the world? Bet you can’t. That is what makes America so unique. If a similar UFO sighting happened in any other country, you could expect a lame press release and that would be that.

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There have been UFO sightings reported all over the world but none with so much frequency as the ones by Americans. Why have most UFO been sighted in the US? In order to answer that question, one has got to view the whole thing more broadly. It is many little things….

One of the ‘little things’ is the innate American conspiracy-theory mindset. It is a product of all those hush-hush Area-51 flights of strange test aircraft such as the B2 Stealth bomber, the U2 and the SR71 Blackbird.

More than most, Americans are vulnerable to being easily swayed by conspiracy theories. In any other country would a Hillary Clinton be accused of running a pedophile ring?

When you are easily taken in by conspiracy theories, it means that you are inquisitive too. Unlike people in other countries, ordinary Americans seem to have a lot of time in their hands, time to fuel their innately inquisitive nature and they won’t let go until they have the answers. That is a good thing when a story is in fact true and not a baseless conspiracy theory. Like in the case of the “Pentagon papers” or “Watergate” or the Jeffery Epstein “client list”.

The other little thing is the propensity for self-aggrandizement. The urge to be in the news, appear on Tik-Tok and be the first to tell the world burns hot in the American psyche. Sometimes it means having to make up events that didn’t really happen.

Steven Spielberg’s “Close encounters of the third kind” was another little thing. It helped fuel the UFO fever in an entertainment-crazy society. Like in the movie, in America there actually are thousands of folks who are prepared to drop everything and go wait by the side of a highway for a UFO sighting. They will even try to make it fun, get their wives and kids with picnic baskets, beer and guitars. Opportunists will arrive with “merch” like T-shirts with flying saucers on them.

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Nowadays, with cellphones and streaming, one would have thought there would be thousands of viral videos of UFOs. There are none. Maybe their 1960s visits to Earth made those aliens realize we were a mediocre species many millennia behind them in enlightenment and not worth further study.

Over the decades, serious mention of the word, “UFO”, has been met with derision. If you are a pilot today and you think you have seen a strange flying craft ahead, chances are you won’t report it. In order not to be laughed at, they have decided to no longer call those objects UFOs. These days the thingamabobs are known as “UAPs” (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).

It must however be noted that the US Government did begin looking at UFOs quite seriously and appointed agencies to study the phenomenon. One study, now terminated, was Project Blue Book (1952-1969) whose final conclusions were that UFO sightings were a result of……

• A mild form of mass hysteria.
• Individuals deliberately perpetrating a hoax for publicity.
• The rantings of Psychopathological persons.
• Misidentification of conventional aircraft.

Were all those sightings really nothing-burgers as Project Blue Book findings suggested?

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Or are there, somewhere in some distant galaxy, two retired 4-feet tall astronauts with hairless bodies, bulbous heads and three toes, sipping supercooled ionized mercury and chomping crushed kryptonite at a bar and chuckling?

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As an incubator of life, our Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds.

But we are seekers, our quest for answers, insatiable. We have sent rovers to the moon and Mars and probes to all the other planets in our solar system and the Sun too.

Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is right now zipping through the Sun’s corona, an extremely hot 4000000ºC environment. Its carbon fibre heat shield withstands that heat because the corona has a very low density and therefore the few ionized particles that hit the probe cause the heat shield’s temperature to rise only to around 2500ºC, something it is designed to withstand easily.

We (the Parker probe, that is) are now, in cosmic terms, within touching distance of the Sun’s surface, just 4 million miles, the closest we have ever gotten and we will come out unscathed. The gravitational sling-shot has made the probe the fastest man-made object, reaching speeds in the excess of 430000 mph or 120 miles every second.

However, simply sending unmanned spacecrafts won’t satisfy us. For various reasons, be it adventure, anticipation of an apocalypse or simply commerce/greed, we insist upon taking ourselves to those places where survival is uncertain, worlds so distant that a simple transmission to a mission in orbit around Neptune will take four hours to receive and another four to respond to. 

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Multiple private companies have announced plans to put up hotels in space soon, correctly surmising that space travel will be mundane, inexpensive even for the common Joe at some future date. NASA wants to 3D print neighborhoods within a couple of decades. And while it will probably take longer than that to build and populate an outpost on even the closest planet, Mars, preparations are being made. 

This July, four NASA crew members ended a 378-day stay inside a 1700 sq.ft, 3D printed habitat called Mars Dune Alpha at NASA’s Johnson Space Center at Houston, Texas. The objective was to test the psychological effects of prolonged life in a Mars-like environment, the effects of isolation and confinement on the crew.

Every day, the crew suited up and went on simulated ‘Mars-walks’. They exercised rigorously for the same reason that astronauts on the ISS do. (The Mars gravity is only 38% of Earth gravity). To supplement their diet, they harvested veggies they grew inside the controlled environment of the habitat and recorded their own health data. They made sure that all the habitat and the equipment were well maintained. 

The isolation and the transmission lag of up to 22 minutes with the outside world were challenging but they learned to get along with each other.

They learned to be a family. They played board games and table tennis, threw each other birthday parties, gave each other haircuts, celebrated holidays together and sat down every day to share meals. At the same time they also learned to give each other space for some ‘me’ time during which they did stuff like paint, read, etc. Since the habitat was earth-bound the health challenges due to zero gravity could not be replicated.

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Off-world dwellings look pretty cozy on NASA’s drawing boards, but it is easy to lose sight of just how hostile space is to human health.

Consider what will happen if you find yourself in low Earth orbit or on Mars or the Moon without a spacesuit on. You will pass out from a lack of oxygen within a matter of seconds, a condition known as hypoxia. You will die soon after. In the brief interval, all the gases inside your body, including any air still in your lungs, will expand in the absence of external pressure. Depressurization will also cause your internal fluids to bubble and boil, not because they’re heating up, but because they are transmogrifying into their gaseous state.

The temperature will not be much of a problem, even though thermometers in low Earth orbit produce readings from minus -160º to plus 125º Celsius, depending on whether you are in shadow or in sunlight. As in the case of the Parker probe, space as a near vacuum, has very little matter to conduct heat to or away from you, so you are not likely to feel instantly hot or cold.

While hypoxia is a real threat should your space vessel or extraterrestrial habitat leak, it is a manageable one. I am assuming you haven’t leapt naked out of your space capsule or off-world dwelling. But two other major challenges confront our fragile bodies when we leave our planet, neither of which has been entirely solved yet, even indoors……

Gravity and Radiation.

Gravity is determined by the mass of objects and their distance from one another. Because Earth is so big, it is impossible, while on it, to escape its gravity for any serious length of time. As a result, we don’t know very much about what our lives would be like without — or under some diminished influence of — this omnipresent attraction. On the moon and on Mars, which are smaller than our world, the gravitational tug will be much less: a sixth and a third, respectively, of what it is here on earth.

Conversely, radiation exposure intensifies with elevation, because there’s less atmosphere above you to block it. And you get a much larger dose if you get beyond the protective bubble of Earth’s ozone layer and the much larger magnetosphere, which is a magnetic field that stretches roughly 40,000 miles from the earth at its most compressed point.

The solar and galactic radiation that washes over Mars and will potentially be 700 times more than what passes through the earth’s magnetic defenses. Space travelers beyond low Earth orbit will also be bombarded with high-energy atomic nuclei from exploding stars throughout the galaxy. (There is at least one star exploding into a supernova at any given time inside our Milky Way Galaxy). 

Those high-energy particles are normally deflected by the magnetosphere and prevented from reaching the surface of our planet. However, they are so heavy and moving so fast that they penetrate spaceships, spacesuits and the skin underneath, smashing into and mutating cells in ways researchers are only beginning to understand. A single gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova can pass through six inches of lead easily.

So far, most of what we know about the effects on the human body of these threats comes from astronauts in low Earth orbit, and because safety of paramount concern, we don’t send many of them up there, and we don’t let them stay for long when we do. Six months is the average length of a visit to the International Space Station, and fewer than 300 people have made the 250-mile voyage.

The magnetosphere still shields the I.S.S. from most of the radiation. Only 24 humans who flew in the Apollo program have gone beyond it. As the moon orbits at an average distance of 238,000 miles, which is way outside the shelter of the magnetosphere, these 24 souls were constantly at peril, even while sitting inside their spacecrafts.

Those two dozen Apollo astronauts who spent little more than a week at a time without the magnetosphere’s protection, they have died of cardiovascular disease at a rate four to five times higher than that of their counterparts who stayed in low Earth orbit or never entered orbit at all. This suggests that exposure to cosmic radiationmight have damaged their arteries, veins and capillaries.

How then do we plan to survive a 21-month round trip to Mars?

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It would be foolhardy to send people to Mars, or to live on the moon, until we can be reasonably confident that they’ll survive getting and residing there. But the space-based medical science needed to make that possible has been hindered by a small sample size that isn’t representative of the general population.

All of the Apollo astronauts were very carefully selected, super-healthy white men born between 1928 and 1936. That is a limited demographic. In order to ensure long-term off-world survival, it is necessary to find out how ordinary, not so healthy people will react to that environment. You don’t learn to treat illnesses from healthy people. It is when people get sick that you understand how people get sick and how to prevent that sickness.

It’s like pandemics. Before epidemiologists can figure out how to protect the population, they must wait for harm to come to enough people to expose the causes. If space travellers are less-rigorously screened medically, the chances that someone will have a health emergency up there will increase and turn the unwell traveller into a sort of guinea pig for space medicine research. Yeah, there will be horrible, painful deaths, our cells will mutate, our babies will be disfigured, stunted, etc, etc.

A question no one can presently answer is whether over years of living and reproducing in deep space, we will learn to cope and protect ourselves, whether we will even mutate into very different human beings who might then, on a trip back to Earth, find it unsurvivable. Remember those smart but obese folks who could move around only on wheel chairs inside that spacecraft in the 2008 cartoon film “WALL-E”? Perhaps humans will also learn to exist in deep space in a similar condition and still find fulfilment in their lives, believing that to be the normal.

Fortunately our own thirst for answers ensures there will never be a lack of guinea pigs among us. Hey, for the first Mars mission, if NASA wants a 70-yr old guinea pig riddled with pre-existing conditions, I’ll go, no question about it.

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Let’s trip back to the 1950s. Scientists then thought that we wouldn’t survive in the absence of Earth’s gravity. Without this still barely understood force pulling us downward, how would we swallow? Wouldn’t our tongues slide back into our throats? Wouldn’t we choke on our own saliva? And if we survived those perils, wouldn’t escalating pressure in our skulls kill us after a week or so?

All those questions got answered when, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin returned from his single 108-minute orbit, in humanity’s first trip beyond the mesosphere, he proved that our internal musculature could maintain our vital functions in conditions of weightlessness. He ate and drank up there without difficulty. Technically, he hadn’t escaped Earth’s influence. To orbit is to free-fall toward the ground without ever hitting it, and he was inside a condition known as microgravity. This felt, he reported, like being in a suspended state, a condition familiar to anyone who has been on a roller coaster or jumped off a diving board. Gagarin said he got used to it easily.

I suspect, given the then ongoing intense east-west rivalry, Gagarin may have been bullshitting a bit. Either that or he had a strong stomach. On a first flight, many astronauts feel intense motion-sickness which can lead to nausea, headache and vomiting. But you acclimatize eventually.

About that nausea thing, researchers only learned about the prevalence of those symptoms in the 1970s, well past the Mercury and Gemini and into the Apollo programs and it was only when they heard Skylab astronauts talking about it with one another over a hot mic. Competition was (and still is) so intense that astronauts were notoriously stoic and unforthcoming about any symptom that might have grounded them.

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On Earth, your body maintains your blood pressure such that enough oxygen reaches your organs and waste is ferried away. One of the biggest oxygen users — your brain — is positioned above your heart for much of the time you are awake. But microgravity suddenly stops pulling blood downward into your legs, just as lying down or getting into a pool does, except more so. That lets blood collect in the upper body, triggering pressure sensors in your heart and the carotid vessels of your neck, which then send hormonal instructions to urinate more and decrease blood production. This is why you often feel the need to pee shortly after climbing into bed or sinking into a swimming pool. On our planet, that’s usually enough to reduce your blood pressure and rebalance the system.

In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. The nose plays an important role in taste. The ISS galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce, to help enhance taste.

These sensory deficits can be a blessing, though, because the ISS tends to smell of body odor and farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume of flatulence increases.

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O (Low Earth Orbit).

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The longer astronauts stay in microgravity, the more they change. Here are some of the stuff that happen to them up there…..

– Because they don’t need to support any weight, bones and muscles begin to atrophy….much faster than they do in advanced age on Earth.

– Bone density in the hips and spine decrease by 1 to 2 percent per month, compared with 0.5 to 1 percent per year in elderly Earthlings. The calcium that leaches from the bones is expelled in urine, increasing the risk of kidney stones.

– Muscle mass decreases. That is why astronauts must exercise vigorously for more than two hours a day to keep in decent shape. They also must constantly dab their skin with a towel while exercising, to prevent their sweat from beading and floating into colleagues or equipment.

– The spinal discs between spinal vertebrae spread farther apart. Astronauts grow taller, but the stretch causes the lower back to hurt.

– On earth our body’s sensors raise our blood pressure when we rise up from lying down, so that we don’t faint. These sensors atrophy with disuse. This degeneration, along with reduced muscle mass, is why astronauts must be carried from their capsules when they return to terra firma after a long mission.

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Once back on earth, the body recalibrates to normal, but protracted stays in microgravity (the current record, 437 days, was set by the Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995) make for painful recoveries. After 340 days in space, Scott Kelly, a NASA veteran of three previous shorter missions, described the period immediately following his return as “much, much worse” than those of earlier trips: “All of my joints and all of my muscles are protesting the crushing pressure of gravity,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Endurance.”

Legend has it that Polyakov, unlike Kelly, strolled out of his capsule unfazed, bummed a cigarette from a friend and started smoking, no kidding. So, I guess the reaction to gravity varies, person to person.

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Of course, physiological recalibration and recovery is relevant only when an astronaut plans to return to earth.

But what if you never came back and instead, planned to stay in orbit or on the moon or Mars or any other off-world for the rest of your life? What if you were one of the travellers on a future cosmic ‘Mayflower’?

If you are one of those with a one-way ticket, relax, that cloud may have a silver lining. The question of the ways that the negative effects of a zero-gravity environment can be beaten is being researched at this very moment. All that we need to do is find a way to create artificial gravity in space.

And all that we humans ever needed to get ahead was a challenge.

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When tourists plan a trip to Arizona, they are sure to head straight for the Grand Canyon. Me, I would be underwhelmed by the Grand Canyon. To me it is just a big jagged hole in the ground that took maybe millions of years to create.

I would want to see the Barringer Meteor Crater instead. Guess how long this crater took to make… a fraction of a second!

For centuries, the crater was believed to be the caldera of an extinct volcano, even though there has been no significant seismic activity in that region. Arizona is far from any tectonic plate boundary. The planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, was the first to recognize that the crater was caused by an asteroid strike.

According to Wikipedia, the Barringer crater was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, when the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper. The area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by mammoths and giant ground sloths.

The crater is less than a mile in diameter and 600ft deep, a fraction of the size of the Chicxulub crater made by the 8-mile wide rock that it caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene event 66 million years back and drove the dinosaurs (and 70% of all living beings) to extinction.

The Chicxulub crater was so significant that created a boundary between two epochs – the Cretaceous and the Paleogene. If you want to read a ramble about it, I have posted a multi-part series of posts here. Just grab a beer and click the link below…..

https://spunkybong.com/2024/05/09/the-cretaceous-paleogene-extinction-event-episode-1/

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Imagine one day, 66 million years back, God comes upon those little wolf-like mammals, the ectoconuses, living hidden in burrows underground, too scared to emerge and be eaten by some foraging ‘pre-teen’ T-Rex. God says in his booming baritone, “Hi guys, I am sending you a nice present – a rock that will wipe out those scary dinosaurs. You’ll have all the time in the world to be able to come out and multiply, diversify, mutate. Eventually after 66 million years, one particular subspecies will have barbecues in their backyard and rule the earth.”

That is exactly what happened. If it hadn’t been for the Chicxulub meteor, maybe we sapiens would never have evolved.

And now, having achieved our dominance, we are left wondering whether there are others like us in the universe.

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Remember the Steven Spielberg movie, “Close encounters of the third kind”? Amazing movie. There is a part where the aliens are repeatedly messaging where they are going to land.

Actually the signal is a bunch of characters everyone is trying to decipher, when someone (an ex-cartographer) gets a brain wave and says those characters must be map longitudes and latitudes.

Yayyy!!!!!

But wait a minute!! Those alien visitors could not possibly have known about our system of longitudes and latitudes. How did they know that we have 360° around a circle? They could be having a system where they divvy up a circle into 1000°, couldn’t they? So, how would they know that latitudes go from -90 to +90°?

And the longitudes?? The aliens would have had to be aware that 0° longitude is an arbitrary line passing through Greenwich in England that the early 18th Century masters of the world – the Brits – had created. Our definition of 0° longitude came from a completely arbitrary human decision taken more than 200 years back.

To know all that would mean that the aliens knew the minutest details about our culture, politics and history. That begs the question…….If the aliens knew so much about us, why couldn’t they just send us a radio transmission in good old English that read, “Hi guys, we are going to land next to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming”?

Worse, on deciphering the message the protagonists in the movie start building a long runway with lights on both sides. A runway?? Come on!!! A runway indicates that an object needs air to make a soft landing. Does an alien spacecraft that has travelled millions of miles through vacuum need a fucking runway?

Heck, Spielberg could have done worse. I love the guy’s movies so I’ll give him a pass on this one.

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According to astronomer J Allen Hynek (1910-1986), there are three ways to define our interactions with an alien……..

If an alien comes close enough for us to make visual contact, it is a close encounter of the first kind. The second kind is an actual intelligent communication from a distance and the third is the above two plus an actual physical contact (like in the movie).

So far neither of the above three have occurred. Be that as it may, astrophysicists are unanimous that extraterrestrial life exists. Whether that life is “intelligent” like ours is not known so far.

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If one considers the fact that intentional, intelligent transmissions like FM radio, TV and radar began on earth only 90 years back, one has to assume that whoever could receive our very first signals would have to be situated no more than 90 light years away at the time and is receiving them right as of now in 2025.

That alien TV watcher can’t watch Pornhub for while yet.

Right now, an alien 90 light years away is probably listening to an episode of “Amos n’ Andy” that aired in 1935 and ROFLing, not at the jokes but at how backward we all are, here on earth. And if he then decides to respond, we will receive his transmission in 2115. We shall all be dead by then.

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Within the 90-light year range, several exoplanets have been discovered. The closest known exoplanet is Proxima Centauri B, located approximately 4.2 light-years from Earth. It orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, which is the star closest to us after the Sun itself. 

Let’s imagine that Proxima B is inside the “goldilocks zone” (habitable zone) of its star and it has an alien toddler sitting and watching our TV. What must he be thinking, if he is watching say, a clip of a couple performing a 69 on Pornhub. Will he appreciate the erotic beauty of it? Likely not.

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Jokes aside, it is virtually certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there is no question in the minds of most astrophysicists. That however does not mean that we will be able to communicate with them. The astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains it beautifully…….

It is known that there is only a less than 1% difference between the DNA of chimps and us humans. What a huge difference that 1% makes! We compose poetry, we are thinkers, philosophers, we have discovered quantum physics, we have created artificial intelligence.

In comparison, what can the smartest chimps do? A chimpanzee has the intellect of a human toddler. It can understand hand signals, pluck a banana beyond their reach by piling rocks one on top of the other and that is all that the smartest chimp can do.

Now imagine an alien species that has a genetic intelligence that is a similar 1% greater than ours just as our genetic intelligence is 1% greater than a chimp’s. What will we look like to them? Definitely not smart enough to communicate with in any intelligent manner. To them, the smartest among us, the Stephen Hawkings and the Einsteins, would be like their toddlers. Their l’il Donny can do the same equations for homework that Stephen Hawking can do.

Would that alien species judge us to be an intelligent species at all? Would they enslave us, make us do domestic chores, put us in a zoo? Would we even know if they did? Or will they find us too primitive to be of any use? Is Earth a zoo for the entertainment of those aliens? Are they laughing at the conflicts we fight amongst ourselves and the Nobel Prizes being dished out for our ”puny” scientific achievements?

There is a very real possibility that such aliens are out there, that they have combed the Milky Way Galaxy in their search for intelligent life, they have visited Earth and they have observed minutely the way we go about our lives.

The most distressing thought that we can have is that based on all the data that the above aliens collected, they have come to the conclusion that there is no “intelligent” life on Earth.

And they have moved on……

“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to thy neighbour…..” (Exodus 19;20-25)

Best selling authors like Frederick Forsyth, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, Leon Uris, James Michener and Tom Clancy have a common work ethos – they take months, sometimes years, to painstakingly research their subject, in order to render a degree of authenticity to their novels.

There was another ‘researcher-novelist’ and to my mind he was the capo-di-tutti-capi of them all :-

British-Canadian Arthur Hailey (1920-2004).

Hailey wrote a string of blockbuster novels in the 1960s and 70s that stand tall as classics of research-driven story telling. “Wheels” is the result of a comprehensive study of the inner workings of Ford, GM and Chrysler. “Overload” is on the American electricity company ConEd, “Moneychangers” is about a bank, “Strong Medicine” – a pharmaceutical company, “The Final Diagnosis” – a hospital and “Hotel” – a 5-star boutique hotel.

In Hailey’s novels, each chapter is a seemingly stand-alone mini narrative having its own protagonist but you know all along that in the end, these narratives will fit perfectly together in a shattering cliffhanger of a climax.

In Hailey’s 1968 blockbuster, Airport, events are quickly escalating inside and around a fictional Lincoln International Airport (based upon his research of Chicago’s O’Hare).

In Airport too, the chapters are seemingly separate narratives that are running side by side.

• A jobless suicidal loser has boarded a US to Rome flight. A highly experienced demolition expert, he is carrying a briefcase that is rigged with a bomb, the trigger a string attached to it’s handle. He plans to pull the string and end it all while the plane is over mid-Atlantic, so that his wife gets the insurance payout. He believes that only then will he redeem himself in her eyes.
• Another airliner that just touched down, took a wrong turn taxiing in. It’s front wheels slid off the asphalt into the soft slushy snow and it is now stranded with its tail and nearly half it’s fuselage sticking into the runway, blocking incoming traffic.
• A tiny municipality abutting a runway is threatening to sue the airport authorities because pilots are refusing to follow hazardous noise abatement procedures which require airliners to bank steeply away after take-off, increasing the chances of a stall.
• The airport general manager and his wife are going through a heart wrenching separation. She is having an affair and he himself is getting cozy with the comely customer relations agent of a major airline.
• A stewardess has informed the married airline pilot she is fucking that she is pregnant and wants to keep the baby.
• A habitual stowaway, an old woman – who often steals into a plane while it is boarding and the crew are too busy to notice. She does this whenever she gets lonely and wants to visit her daughter in Seattle. Early tonight she was caught trying the same thing but she managed to escape and gain entry into the first flight that was boarding, the one to Rome that has the suicidal guy. Her seat is next to his.
• The worst snowstorm in history is threatening to shut down the airport. A blizzard is raging outside the large panoramic plate glass windows. Winds are in the excess of 60 knots. While a jet liner can take a lot of headwind, it cannot remain steady in crosswinds above 40 knots. Tonight that limit is breached and has rendered all but one runway functional (The one that is blocked by the airliner that plowed into the snow).

All these separate unrelated narratives come together in a shattering climax.

It usually took Hailey three years to write a book. The first 12 months were spent on travelling, interviewing, witnessing first hand and researching the subject. The next 6 months he reviewed his notes and the remaining 18 months he sat at his typewriter writing the novel.

The result was a plot-driven, character-driven, research-driven masterpiece of fiction.

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Arthur Hailey’s distinctive storytelling style first emerged in 1962, with “In high places”, a novel that is a melange of three seemingly separate chains of events. One is the professional and personal lives of the Canadian Prime Minister and his right-hand man who is having an affair with the PM’s secretary. The second is an illegal immigrant who is a stowaway inside a ship docked at Vancouver whose lawyer is trying to gain him entry as a refugee into Canada.

The third storyline is what this post is about. It is the chilling depiction of events that lead to a situation where the possible annexation of Canada by the US is being decided upon, when fresh intelligence shows an imminent threat of a Soviet nuclear attack on the US.

Seemingly the three separate narratives are unconnected but, indirectly they are.

There have been many novels on nuclear armaggedons but In high places holds a special place among them.

Let me start the chills for you –

It is the 1960s and North America is preparing to defend itself against an imminent nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union, an act of aggression brought on by a paranoid ultra-nationalist Russia which is beginning to recognize that it‘s communist utopia is actually a sham. More nations are turning to the western style democracies than the Soviet system and hardliners within the Supreme Soviet have decided it is time to stop the trend.

All intelligence from assets deep within the Kremlin point toward an attack that will come over the North Pole. A barrage of 10 to 20 R-36 Vovoda ICBMs will launch from Kozel’sk, Pervomaysk, Kostroma and Tatischevo and the 5-minute boost from their first stages will send them soaring 250 kms into space in an elliptic path whose major axis is vertical.

The missiles will rapidly gain altitude to 1200 kms and then fly through space 5265 kms over the North Pole before their noses dip to reenter the earth’s atmosphere somewhere over Canada’s Baffin Island inside the Arctic Circle. They will cross Canadian airspace, still so high up in the upper atmosphere as to be indistinguishable to the naked eye.

Somewhere around Northern Alberta, the ICBMs will bear downward, rapidly losing altitude and diverging toward separate destinations deep within the heart of America.

Each reentry vehicle will have a single 25-Megaton thermonuclear warhead, 17000 times more powerful than the “Little Boy” device that was detonated over Hiroshima.

Arthur Hailey correctly surmises that the Soviet attack won’t use Tsar Bomba-type “airdrop” bombs that have to be dropped from subsonic Tu-95 bombers –  sitting ducks for the US Air Force’s new Lockheed F-104 Starfighters. He goes for ICBMs instead.

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The Soviet missile barrage will be swift – 23 times the speed of sound kinda swift. However, it is still expected to give America around 10 minutes to respond – enough time to launch interceptor missiles from their silos in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Since the Soviet warheads are of the contact-detonation type, America doesn’t need the interceptors to be very high yield. Fission-type MIRV warheads with 750 kiloton yields should be sufficient to blow the incoming Soviet ICBMs to smithereens.

The missiles will be transiting Canadian airspace, so the Americans have shared with Canada the results of numerous simulations (done on gigantic IBM mainframe computers of the day), which show that the intercepts will occur over some of the most industrialized and densely populated regions of Canada – Quebec and Ontario to the east, Alberta in the mid-west and British Columbia on the western seaboard.

The Soviets are expected to target food sources – American food sources. But given the intercepts, those food sources shall unfortunately be Canada’s vast mid-western farmlands that seem to stretch to eternity.

A sure way to ensure the demise of a nation is to contaminate its farms.

If the intercepts go through as planned, the central Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba will be hit with fallout. And in order to ensure that every square mile is blanketed with heavy fallout of highly radioactive debris, the detonation of these warheads is going to be ‘airburst’, set off automatically at a height of 5000 feet.

It’s population decimated, industry shattered and farmlands rendered untouchable for at least a century, Canada as a nation will cease to exist.

The US will not go unscathed but the damage, in the form of contaminated landmass, is expected to be marginal. If at all, only the far corners in the North-West (around Washington state) and the North-East (around Vermont and Maine) will be marred by those deadly wind-blown white flakes that folks will mistake for snow. This is because the wind patterns over Canada are almost invariably lateral – in the east-west direction.

Most major industrial cities and coastal population centers in the US shall remain untouched. One analysis shows that below the 35th parallel, America won’t suffer any radioactive fallout at all.

The US would survive the first strike, but Canada would not.

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The Canadian military has always been a toothless, token force and now, as the gloves begin to come off, it looks as if Canada might look like a collateral damage statistic in the Phd thesis of some fresh faced political science graduate student.

There is of course NORAD – North American Aerospace Defense Command – the new US/Canadian joint defense initiative that is supposed to ward off an airborne assault. But this is 1962 and NORAD is still nascent, having been made operational only a year earlier. NORAD’s base of operations is under construction – a sprawling, heavily fortified underground bunker deep inside the Cheyenne Mountain, a 3000-metre triple peak outside Colorado Springs, in Colorado.

NORAD is not yet capable of staving off a thermonuclear first strike that will be so massive that it will be beyond the pale of human understanding.

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Now the good news (if you can call it that). To prevent Canada’s demise, In high places delivers a chilling twist……

America has made Canada a Corleonesque offer, one that Canada cannot refuse – America will annex Canada as an integral part of the US (it’s 51st state), immediately becoming world’s largest country in terms of, not only landmass, but mineral wealth as well.

In return, those interceptor missile batteries will be moved north and stationed along the northern Canadian tundra. Now the intercepts shall happen over mostly uninhibited, ice-bound wasteland. Sure, the polar bear and caribou population will be decimated, but shit happens. And thanks again to the lateral wind patterns, hopefully most of Canada will be spared the fallout.

If you haven’t read “In high places”, consider it an imperative.

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The narrative in Hailey’s novel is based upon an outside threat, the Soviet Union. What if Canada did face annihilation, not from Russia but from its very own protector, America, the country that had once signed a treaty swearing to treat Canada’s security as its own?

We would be in a nasty pickle and for that, Canada has itself to blame, for never attempting to go nuclear and never trying to build up its own independent military and firepower. With its large deposits of high grade Uranium and its pioneering work on nuclear reactors, Canada could have stockpiled at least 250 warheads to ensure no one ever fucked with it.

Alas, Canada broke the first law of state craft – never place your blind trust on another nation.

Trump wants to “annex” Canada as its 51st state. His reasons are basically the same as the erstwhile Soviets’ – “I want Canada and its riches and I can take it, so fuck everybody”.

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Even before Trump happened, the US annexation of Canada – by force, if required – was already a reality waiting to happen. A bill, tabled in 1866, called “Bill to Annex Canada [HR754]” has been in the US Congress, technically still an active proposal, awaiting deliberation, waiting to go into law ever since it was first tabled.

H.R.754 proposed, without real consent or plebiscite, that the “British” provinces of Canada, ie : the English-speaking provinces would be constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America, with military force if necessary.

At that point in time, Quebec – a French-speaking province where I live – was not targeted for annexation.

Therefore, back in 1866, H.R.754 was seeking to annex 85% of Canada, in terms of both, land mass and population and almost 100% of all its natural resources.

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At Derby Line, the US/Canada border passes right through even some private houses. You can literally have sex in America, then go into the kitchen and make supper in Canada.

There is a tiny municipality in southern Saskatchewan named Coronach, that used to be a small wayside stop for trappers and hunters crossing over in search of game. Coronach is on the US/Canada border, it’s population hovering around 200 off-season. At the start of fall, when the Canadian hunting season begins, the figure would jump to 350-400.

In the early 1970s, a coal-fired power plant came up nearby and the population swelled to 1000 and has remained at around that level ever since.

The Poplar River Power Project and the adjacent coal mines have injected some life into the otherwise somnolent little town, but only slightly. Pay days see a slight increase in the hustle bustle at The Rustic Tavern, on Center Street and Sunday attendance at the Coronach Catholic Church has grown just a little.

Otherwise, ‘Snooze City’ is a more apt name for Coronach.

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The US and Canada have the world’s longest undefended border and it is dotted with more than a hundred little towns like Coronach, all the way from Lake Champlain in the east to the North Cascades National Park, south of Vancouver in the west. If you are either a Canadian or an American, all you have to do is to grab your passport or Nexus Card and simply drive across.

Things are beginning to change…

For ‘obviously white’ travellers, US/Canada border crossings remain completely fuss-free. You are in and out within 15-20 minutes, no sweat, if there is no holiday rush. But if you are non-white or have a name like Mohammad or Abu Bakr or something, getting into the US will take longer and may even get dicey if you can’t converse with the US border agents satisfactorily in English or if you show “attitude”.

Then there are towns that literally straddle the border and one readily comes to mind – the American town of Derby Line(aka Beebe Plain), which is known as Stanstead on the Canadian side, situated at the border between the Canadian province of Quebec and the US state of Vermont.

The border runs right down the middle lane divider of the main thoroughfare, Canusa Street, an orangish double line you can see in the image below. If you overtake someone on Canusa Street and don’t have your passport with you, there is a good possibility you will be pulled over by a border patrol agent for unauthorized incursion.

Earlier a detention, for crossing the orange double line without a passport, was very rare but that is changing as well.

There is even a public library that straddles the border – The Haskell Free Library and Opera House. The US-Canada border runs right through the building, dissecting the reading room floor in two. Note the black line on the floor, thats the border in the image below…

While inside the library, you can cross over the line freely, to sit and read or to access the coffee machine or go to the loo, without having to produce your passport. In the past, gun runners used this bit of freedom to smuggle handguns from the US into Canada. They would go to the loo, the guns inside a backpack and simply leave the backpack behind for the Canadian contact to walk in and walk out with the it. I understand that now bags are checked on the US side.

I swear I am not kidding about all this. It is just a glimpse of just how close Canada and the US are, as friends.

Then there is the Post Office. I remember once, we were on a weekend drive around Quebec, when we stopped at Stanstead for sandwiches. Like the Haskell Library, the Post Office too straddles the border. It has two doors and a counter for each country. 

We ambled in.

Afterward, we came out the wrong door by mistake and were traversing the parking lot searching for Bertha (our Corolla) when we realized we were on the US side. We hadn’t brought our passports but our drivers licenses were sufficient. Two hefty (but courteous) American border agents appeared and walked us to our side of the border and everybody had a good laugh over it.

“Sorry we stepped in,” I said to them.

“Happens all the time. Think nothing of it. Have a great day,” said the agent.

Derby Line/Beebe Plain not only has public properties that the border dissects, the international border also passes right through some private houses, no kidding. You can literally have sex in America and then go into the kitchen, make breakfast and sit down to eat it in Canada.

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If one were to draw a polygon that touches quirky border towns like Derby Line, the two oceans on either side and the northernmost reaches of the province of Nunavat, then that is what is Canada, a landmass whose staggering natural grandeur is paralleled only by it’s enormous mineral wealth.

Those upper regions of Nunavat, engulfing Baffin Bay, Hudson Bay and the maze of straits and inlets that collectively call themselves The Northwestern Passages – those 3 million square miles of Canadian territory alone are home to 15% of the world’s known untapped oil reserves and 22% of the unexploited natural gas, collectively totalling 60 BTOE (Billion Tons of Oil Equivalent).

Those are just the known reserves – serious exploration hasn’t even started yet.

The far north is not the only oil rich region of my beloved homeland. In the Canadian southwest, over millions of years, the Pacific Plate has pushed inward and slid underneath the North American Plate, causing the earth to buckle and rise high until it became the Canadian Rockies, all the while squishing at high pressure miles and miles of vegetation, turning the topsoil into bitumen that became a thick gooey mud we now call ‘tar sands’. The province of Alberta, east of the Rockies, sits on over a trillion tons of the tar sands, which in turn translate to 15 billion barrels of crude oil.

Besides oil and natural gas, the remote wilderness of the north also sits on immense deposits of other minerals, such as iron ore, copper, zinc, silver and diamonds. The world’s richest diamond mine is not in South Africa, but at Diavik, Nunavut, where one single strain churns out over 10 million carats of large, spectacularly clear, gem-quality diamonds every year.

When you leave the northern territories behind and venture south, you find massive herds of caribou grazing over barren semi-frozen land that looks deceptively empty. But take a pickaxe and drive it into the ground and a whole new world opens up before you – one that has obscenely rich deposits of nickel, vanadium and molybdenum, three metals without which the world would never have had stainless or maraging steels and cars would never have been commercially viable as a consumer product. 

To the east, in Ontario, large open-cast mines are spewing out titanium – a metal that is absolutely essential to the aerospace industry. The titanium comes from ore that is 15% rich. Although in terms of reserves of the Titanium Oxide ore, Canada is 5th, the concentration of the Canadian ore is the highest.

Go further south, along the wilderness of the Cascades and the Rockies, down along the rolling prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and another land of Aladdin emerges, one that is rich in potash, gold, silver, zinc, copper and platinum and rare earths like tantalum and niobium and a host of heavy metals such as uranium, cesium, tellurium and selenium.

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If there is one thing that history has taught us over and over, it is that when you live in a nation that is endowed with enormous natural wealth, you possess something which someone else may covet – especially if that someone else is a militarily powerful neighbour with a hair-trigger demagogue at it’s helm – one who has bet his fellow citizens’ lives and well-being on economics that is about to go bust under nearly $40 trillions of debt.

And if the nation you live in is a part of alliances with other nations that assure your security, like the UN Security Council, NATO or NORAD, the same history shows that alliances dissolve over time and that if you don’t plan for that day and arm yourself, you will be vulnerable.

Sounds outlandish, doesn’t it – Canada bent over, it’s shorts around its ankles, facing aggression and needing to defend itself? But then so did it sound to many Czechs, back in 1939……