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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……

In the first 5-8 years after the Second World War, China and the USSR became close friends. They signed a friendship treaty that saw military and economic aid flow from the USSR into an impoverished, agro-based China.

The bromance appeared to bring in a new age of Sino-Soviet co-operation, until the unthinkable happened. All of a sudden in 1953, Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev, a vastly different personality, took over. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was a bit like an earlier version of Gorbachev – a watered-down peacenik. Unlike Gorbachev, Khrushchev didn’t want personal freedoms for Soviet citizens, however. All he wanted was the scaling down of the nuclear posturing and peaceful co-existence.

When Khrushchev, in 1956, publicly denounced Stalin – an action once considered blasphemy – China’s Mao-Tse-Dong realized he could no longer take Soviet support for granted. Khrushchev’s openness could infect Chinese politics as well and threaten his grip on power. Mao wanted to keep his absolute power and his Leninist scorched-earth ideology intact.

That same year, when the Soviets invaded Hungary to crush an anti-communist rebellion, Mao feared the same thing could happen to China. Helpless without sufficient military might, constantly pressured to obey Soviet dominance in the communist bloc and paranoid that the Soviets could invade China and annex it with ease, Mao began devising a long term plan that would maintain the USSR’s standing as an ally but ensure a partnership that was more equal. He announced the “Great Leap Forward”, a hurricane-speed action plan to modernize China from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

Turns out, Mao’s great leap was an unmitigated disaster. Having already purged the “intellectual class”, he had no brain power available to carry his megalomania forward. The pulling of manpower from the farms to the industry devastated China’s agricultural output, causing a famine the world had never witnessed. Millions starved to death.

Meanwhile, sensing the sudden Chinese coldness, the Soviets gradually began to withdraw their industrial and military experts from China. Aid to China reduced to a trickle. Then, on a visit to the US, Khrushchev felt first-hand the vast chasm between America’s technological advances and sophistication and the Soviet system’s primitive industry.

Along a parallel track, Khrushchev initiated a series of moves that would later come to be known as Détente, a period of relaxation of strained relations, with the west. 

It was at this point that fate decided to take matters into its own hands once again.

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The 39-member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the highest body of Soviet State Authority, itchy at the sudden closeness with the west, removed Nikita Khrushchev. Obviously, like Mao, the members of the Soviet Presidium too thought that Khrushchev was moving the USSR toward too much peace, too quickly.

Earlier removals had been accompanied by summary executions, but Khrushchev’s life was spared. He was told to henceforth shut the fuck up and relegated to a dacha outside Moscow, to spend the rest of his life in comfortable retirement.

Once again a Stalin-like hardliner took over, a guy called Leonid Brezhnev, not as foaming-in-the-mouth as Mao but close enough. Bezhnev’s ascent however didn’t help to lessen Mao’s paranoia, since the Soviets decided it was in their best interests to continue on with the détente process with the US.

The mutual mistrust between the Soviets and China gradually led to sporadic border skirmishes that flared up with increasing frequency, until it began to appear like the beginning of a much wider conflict.

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There have been moments in history when actual events have progressed rapidly out of control like cannoning dominoes, only to be aborted at the brink of an Armageddon.

One such event occurred in the early autumn of 1969, a month after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

It had begun that spring actually, when a group of 30 Chinese PLA soldiers waded through the chill, waist-deep waters of the Ussuri, onto a disputed 1 ½ mile long diamond-shaped spit of an island in the middle of the river, that was called Zhenbao by the Chinese and Damansky by the Russians.

Once on the island the Chinese soldiers engaged the KGB Border Guards, sparking off a series of skirmishes, that collectively came to be known as the Zhenbao incident.

There is no question though, that the whole affair had been orchestrated by the Chinese leader, Mao Tse Tung, to deliver an indirect message to the US that, by breaking with the USSR, China was prepared to begin normalizing relations with the US, a process that later came to be known as the Sino-US Rapprochement.

Then, in the middle of August 1969, a startling thing happened at a luncheon at the Hotel America’s Beef and Bird Restaurant in Washington DC. The meeting had been proposed by Boris N. Davydov (Second Secretary, Embassy of the USSR) with William L. Stearman (Special Assistant for USSR, China and North Vietnam, Department of State).

Davydov was paying. His proposal was pretty straightforward……

“We plan to bomb the Chinese – especially their nuclear installations and major population centres – back to stone-age in a pre-emptive strike, to eliminate any further threat on our southern borders. If you go along, you have two pluses – First, you will benefit from one less communist power to confront and second, Vietnam is yours. We will lay off Vietnam the moment we sign a deal. We didn’t like those gooks anyway.”

For once, the US acted with maturity. It declined the offer and cautioned the Soviets that any pre-emptive strike could start a nuclear conflagration and that was totally unacceptable.

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What the Americans (or the world) could not have known was that the Soviet proposal was actually only an intimation, not a proposal at all. The pre-emptive strike was already on.

What went down is cloaked in secrecy even today, but if you want to know what could well have happened, you’ll have to wait for Part-2.

1225th Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment

Belaya Long Range Aviation Base

Irkutsk Oblast, U.S.S.R

August 19, 1969

00:30 hrs

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The Tu-95 taxied to the end of the 3-mile long asphalt and made a sweeping u-turn before it lined itself up with its nose gear on the white median line. Its commander, Col. Anton Babayev, was a patient man. He waited, his hand on the throttle and right foot on the brakes, eyes impassive, now completely accustomed to amber green glow of the cockpit.

The Tu-95 Strategic bomber has had a storied past. When Soviet forces invaded Nazi Germany, they forcibly took back with them 2500 of the best Nazi automobile and aviation engineers and designers. The Americans too had their own get-the-nerds version, whereby 1600 Nazi scientists and engineers came over to the US, in an operation code-named Paperclip. 

Unlike the Soviets, the Americans didn’t have to use force. The Nazis happily moved in, set up house in government-purchased cottages and villas and drove government purchased late model cars and went about developing ground-breaking American aerospace technology. 

In fact the Nazis discovered to their delight that they had a lot of sympathizers among the Americans, with whom they could get misty-eyed nostalgic, reminiscing about the “good old days” using slave labor in their industries back in Germany. Short of being able to break out into the “Horst Wessel” song, they say what they liked.

The Soviets methodically stripped down the Junkers bomber factory in Dessau and shipped every little bit of machinery and design drawing to Kuibyshev in the USSR, where factory was rebuilt from ground up.

Among the Germans abducted by the Soviets was a brilliant aviation engineer and Nazi Party member named Ferdinand Brandner. Under direct orders from Stalin, Brandner was handled with kid gloves, given anything he wanted, a life of luxury and a pretty Russian woman and tasked to create new kinds of war planes. In time, he was co-opted into the Tupolev Design Bureau.

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In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, an American B29 bomber, its rudder slightly damaged in an air raid over the Japanese city of Sapporo, force landed on a country road outside Vladivostok in the eastern tip of the USSR. Earlier in the war, as a part of the Allied forces, the Soviet Union had wanted to lease a few B29s to study the design but the Americans had seen through them and hemmed and hawed deliberately, playing for time.

Now, with a B29 on the ground, the Soviets refused to give it back. Three more lightly damaged B-29s soon followed after emergency landings from participating in raids over Japan. The US demanded them back, but the Soviets kept them and asked the Tupolev Design Bureau to replicate them instead.

Ferdinand Brandner was put to work on the design. The result was a re-engineered B-29 called the “Tupolev Tu-4.”

Realizing that the Tu-4’s piston engines were not powerful enough, Brandner redesigned the aircraft and fitted four Kuznetsov coupled turboprops, each equipped with two contra-rotating propellors (see the box in the image above). 

The aircraft was initially called the Tu-20, but the name was later dropped in favor of the Tu-95. In time, NATO gave the Tu-95 a code name – Bear.

You are dying to know what a contra-rotating propellor is. Hang on, Uncle Spunky will tell you everything. 

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As Col. Babayev lined up the Bear for take-off, straight ahead the pitch darkness was punctured by two strings of blue runway lights that seemed to converge into a blurry point at the far distance. Beside him, his co-pilot, reed-thin Maj. Illya Molodchi, leaned forward a little and then turned his head sideways till he was staring at the swept-back, slightly drooping right wing, weighted down by the two Kuznetsov-12Ms, the most powerful turbo-prop engines ever developed.

Right now, the Kuznetsovs were barely ticking over at a sedate 600 rpm but already the contra-rotating propeller sets were deafening, their roar penetrating even heavily insulated ear pads in the crews’ helmets. When the propellers reached 1200rpm, the Bear would be in the air, cruising at 0.85 times the speed of sound.

An interesting fact about the Kuznetsov engine is that at cruising speed, the tips of its propellers break the sound barrier, making the Bear the noisiest aircraft in the world, so noisy in fact, that submarines can easily detect one flying overhead with their passive sonars. There is a belief that Tu-95 crew have experienced significant loss of hearing after prolonged service on this aircraft.

As to the Bear’s speed, to put it in perspective, regular commercial jets cruise at around 0.80 Mach, while the Tu-95 cruises at 0.85 Mach . This makes the Bear the fastest turbo-prop on the planet, which it is even today, being still in service with the Russian Strategic Air Command.

The Russians, when they see something that works, they stick with it. Tu-95 Bears have been around and going strong even today.

Contra-Rotating Propellers (CRPs, as they are known in the aviation word) are a set of two propellers on the same axis, coupled by a set of planetary gears to make them rotate in opposite directions, the second prop a bit smaller in diameter than the one in front. Between them, the two propellers coax the onrushing airflow and shove it backward with the thrust of 15000 horses. 

The product of Russian aviation genius, CRPs provide greater fuel efficiency, higher speeds and more power. 

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CRPs were just one of many Soviet technological advances. In science and technology, they were crawling with geniuses. Unfortunately they were, like the American saying goes, “all dressed up with nowhere to go”. Soviet scientists worked within a government structure that did nothing to motivate them to apply their scientific innovations to practical use. Brilliant research papers sat forgotten on shelves.

Likewise, Radio Transparent Technology, the Soviet moniker for Stealth technology, was gathering dust on some forgotten cupboard in the Soviet Academy of Sciences until the early 1990s, when an imploding Soviet Union spilt it’s secrets like a vanquished T-Rex sprawled on the ground, its guts spilling out.

Every victory has its spoils and the fall of communism was no different. In the chaos of the latter half of the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union leaked secrets like a sieve. Everything was up for a price. An engineer at the Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (a.k.a. Skunk Works), got his hands on a Russian scientific paper and said, ‘Hey that’s easy. We could do something like that’ and before long, the world had its first stealth fighter, the F117.

But I digress. Let’s get back to Col. Babayev and his crew.

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Standing frozen at the end of the strip, the giant bomber thrummed and grumbled as it strained against its leash, the effort to stay still sending shuddering vibrations through it’s air-frame. Outside, the night was moonless and the air surprisingly still, almost as if nature had decided to pause and bear witness to what was about to happen.

Tonight, the Bear would need all the power her Kuznetsovs packed, just to clear the runway. She had a passenger with a one-way ticket, a teardrop-shaped metal object weighing in at just over 22 tons.

Russians love giving names to inanimate objects and so the passenger too had a name – “Kuzkina Tetya”

In Russian, it meant literally “Kuzka’s Aunt”.

The passenger was so named after her illustrious twin, Kuzkina Mat, who had made a similar one-way flight eight years prior. Kuzkina Mat had been a test. Some say Kuzkina Mat was given her name by none other than Nikita Khrushchev.

The story goes that when the Americans tested what was for them, their most powerful thermonuclear device – a fusion device that was code-named Castle Bravo and had an yield of 15 megatons, the Soviets gave it a name of their own – ‘Kuzka’, a derogatory reference commonly used in Russia those days, roughly translated in English as ‘pipsqueak’.

Khrushchev is reported to have sneered at the American ambassador derisively at a meeting during the 1961 May-1st celebrations, “My obirayemsya pokazat’ im Kuz’kina mat!” (That’s it? 15 Megatons? Well, soon we are going to show you Kuzka’s mother).

And Kuzka’s mother she certainly turned out to be. The Kuzkina Mat test had the explosive power equivalent to the simultaneous explosion of 58 million tons of TNT. That was ten times the power of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. Her mushroom cloud was 64 kms high and 40 kms in diameter and her shockwave travelling round the earth three times, breaking windows, cracking foundations as far as Marseilles.

Over the years, Kuzkina Mat also got to be called by many other names, including Tsar Bomba and Big Ivan.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya, though only slightly larger in size and weight, was going to be infinitely more destructive. It had been rated at 105 Megatons.

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The tower broke in over the whine of the Kuznetsovs, the voice over the radio sounding disembodied and almost casual, “Eto dvizheniye. Tetya Dobycha Kuz’kina yedet priyatno i legko, Polkovnik . Udachi.” (It’s a go. Drop Kuzka’s Aunt off and get the hell out of there, Colonel. She has bad breath. Good luck).

Babayev chuckled. “Spasibo , derzhat’ vodku okhlazhdennoy (Thank you, I am not the one who’s going to kiss her ass. Just keep the vodka chilled and stop worrying about us),” he said, as his right hand tightened its grip over the throttle lever and slid it forward while at the same time, his foot came off the brakes.

The Tu-95 heaved and then swerved momentarily, as though it was caught by surprise. It’s nose veered off the median line for a moment, before it regained its heading and charged down the asphalt, slowly accelerating as it raced toward the other end of the runway.

120 knots…130…140…150… the massive bomber labored to reach the magic figure – 200 knots, while the far-end perimeter fence and the south-side guard tower dead ahead, rushed forward to embrace it.

“If we are going by road, don’t you think we ought to slow down a bit, Boss?” Illya was known in the base for his understatements and his wry humor.

Babayev grinned, “Hang on, Illya, this devochka can fly us to the moon if she wants to. Here we go.”

The bomber staggered up into the air, the four Kuznetsovs screaming on full throttle. As soon as he felt it leave the asphalt, Babayev retracted the landing gear, afraid it might snag against the perimeter fence otherwise. The belly of the Bear cleared the fence with only a few meters to spare.

Thankfully, the land around the base had been razed flat, so there was no possibility of hitting a tree or a phone line.

Once off the ground the Tu-95 labored on, at a 20° pitch until it levelled off finally at 37000 feet, its nose pointing southward. After a while, everything went black as the world’s largest fresh water lake, the Baikal, slid by 7 miles below.

Once over Mongolia, the bomber would gain a further mile up before settling at 42000 feet. Thirty minutes out, the Bear made a slight course change to south-easterly as it entered Mongolian airspace and continued speeding along like a silver dart, eight miles above the barren steppes. It was going to be a nice two and half hour flight.

The last one and quarter hour would be inside Chinese airspace.

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The Bear was not alone. There were four others, strategic bombers all – two Badgers(Tu-16s) and two Blinkers(Tu-22s). Like the Bear, they were sneaking into Chinese airspace from different directions that very minute. The first Tu-16 had launched from the 444th Heavy Bombardment Wing at Spassk-Dalniy close to the China’s eastern border with the USSR and the second had scrambled from the 326th, Vozdvizhenka, a few hundred kms east of Spassk-Dalniy. The Blinkers had taken off from the 303rd at Zavitinsk in the Amur Oblast, directly north of the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator.

Like the Bear, the Badgers and the Blinkers too had passengers with deadly intent, devices that were considerably smaller in weight and yield – around 8 Megatons each. 8 Megatons isn’t puny exactly. 8 Megatons can wipe out a large metropolis like Mumbai and its suburbs.

Like Kuzkina Tetya, the others had names too. Sestra was going to hit a plutonium extraction facility in Guangyuanand. Dyadya would vaporize a warhead assembly plant at Harbin. Devushka would obliterate the Heiping Gas Diffusion Plant with it’s adjoining experimental reactor, while Babushka annihilated Chengdu, home of China’s gas centrifuges that spun at 30000 rpm, enriching uranium to 98% weapons-grade purity.

Hopefully, Babushka’s blast and fallout would lay waste to even the Chinese state-owned Chengdu Aircraft Industry which had painstakingly reverse-engineered the Chengdu J-7, a replica of the legendary Mig-21 jet fighter-interceptor, a squadron of which the Soviets themselves had gifted the Chinese just two years prior.

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And now about Kuzkina Tetya herself, the device that Col. Babayev and his crew were babysitting to target. It was a classic three-stage Teller–Ulam design, using a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then using the energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger third thermonuclear stage.

Tetya was not an identical twin to her elder sis, actually. Kuzkina Mat had only one third stage while Tetya had in total eight third stages, that would go off one behind the other, the intervals of course being in pico-seconds. It was going to be one big party for those frenzied neutrons.

Tetya would detonate in the atmosphere just as her predecessor had done, 2 miles above the earth, but that’s where the similarity would end…..

The 1961 detonation of Kuzkina Mat had a 58 Megaton yield. It been a test, planned over unpopulated Soviet territory, a barren ice-bound archipelago called Novaya Semlya, way above the Arctic Circle. Even then, concern over the fallout and the ecological damage to whole swathes of the Russian far north, had prompted the Soviets to install lead tampers at the second and third fusion stages.

The lead tampers restricted the flow of neutrons and thus inhibited both, her destructive power and radioactive fallout. They were kind of like a tranquilizer to a hyperactive kid suffering from ADHD. The inhibited detonation also gave the crew of the delivery bomber a fighting chance to get away far enough to be able to survive the shock wave.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya had a design yield of 105 Megatons and no lead tampers. It would explode over the heads of 12 million living, breathing souls going about their daily lives directly below, in one of the world’s most populous cities – China’s capital, Beijing.

Kuzkina Tetya did not need to be inhibited by lead tampers. She had U-238 fusion accelerators instead, that would do to the fusion reaction what anabolic steroids do to an athlete’s testosterone level. She was set to produce the same energy as a 500-meter asteroid slamming into the earth at 20 kms/second. To anyone with a seismometer within a 500 mile radius of ground zero, the resultant tremor would register 9.4 on the Richter scale.The energy released would be equal to 1.8% of the power output of the Sun.

All told, Tetya would be directly responsible for the deaths of 40-50 million Chinese, 12 million of whom, Beijing city folk, would be instantly vaporized, while the rest would die very slow and painful deaths from radiation sickness.

Tetya’s estimated yield of 105 megatons would equal the detonation of all the explosives that had ever been produced since 492AD, when a short beady-eyed Chinese alchemist discovered that saltpeter burned with explosive force and decided to find out if he could turn it into an offensive weapon, thus stumbling into gunpowder. 

I was just kidding about the short and beady-eyed. No one ever recorded what the alchemist looked like. Before he blew himself up.

Released from 42000 feet, Tetya was programmed to detonate the moment she fell through 11000 feet. It was not going to be a free fall. She would be slowed down by a massive 1½ ton parachute, in order to give the Bear hopefully sufficient time to make it to where it would not get knocked out of the sky by the shock-wave.

Not that that mattered. The Bear (and everything inside it), was expendable, a fact that Col. Anton Babayev and his crew knew well. It was a life they had chosen, drenched in adrenalin and patriotism.

A song hovered in the periphery of Babayev’s mind, one that his late father and his comrades used to sing as they scurried out into open ground between burnt-out shells of tenements in Stalingrad 1942, in order to draw fire so that the Wehrmacht sniper’s position would be revealed……

His chest swelling with pride, Babayev sang out as loudly as he could, “Rodina-Mat zovyot! Vse za Rodinu!” – The motherland calls! Everything for the motherland!