When Russian Radar Mistook a Norwegian Scientific Rocket for a U.S. Missile, the World Narrowly Avoided Nuclear War

When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear war. But on January 25, 1995, that threat once again came front and center when Russian officers mistook a Norwegian rocket sent to study the aurora borealis for a weapon of mass destruction.

While not as well known as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the “Norwegian rocket incident” is considered one of the world’s closest brushes with nuclear war.

In the early morning hours of January 25, a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from Norway’s Andoya Rocket Range, a launch site off the country’s northwestern coast. Its purpose: to study the northern lights over Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

Although the scientists had notified dozens of countries, including Russia, in advance of their high-altitude scientific experiment, the information never made its way to Russia’s radar technicians.

How a Science Experiment Almost Started a Nuclear War | The Norwegian Rocket Incident

Just four years after the Cold War’s end, tensions between the former USSR and the United States remained high. So when Russian officers at the Olenegorsk Radar Station detected a fast-moving object that was traveling on a high northbound trajectory above the Barents Sea, near Russia’s northern border, they feared it might be a nuclear attack from U.S. submarines. After all, it was similar in speed and flight pattern to a missile. It reached an altitude of 903 miles, separating into several sections as it flew, in the same way warheads would detach from a submarine-launched Trident missile.

Russia’s modus operandi was to identify an attack, assess it and decide whether to retaliate, all within ten minutes. Tracking the trajectory of the “missile” had already taken up the bulk of that time.

As a result, Russian submarine commanders were put on alert and ordered to prepare for a nuclear response. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was notified and given the Cheget, Russia’s nuclear briefcase—typically kept near the leader of a nuclear-weapons state at all times. This holds the launch codes for the country’s missile arsenal, which can be used to order a nuclear strike. To this day, it’s the only known activation of a nuclear briefcase in response to a possible attack.

After conferring with his top advisers, Yeltsin concluded that the rocket was heading away from Russian airspace and didn’t pose any threat to the country.

Twenty-four minutes after its launch, the rocket fell into the sea near Spitsbergen, the only permanently inhabited island on the Svalbard archipelago. The entire incident was over as quickly as it seemingly began.

It was a harrowing false alarm, and one that had the potential to cause widespread casualties. Though the incident has largely flown beneath history’s radar, it did lead to the re-evaluation and redesign of notification and disclosure protocols in both the U.S. and Russia.