Navy Mines Explode near Vietnam
In 1972, the US Navy dropped sea mines off the coast of Vietnam south of Haiphong to disrupt supply shipping to North Vietnam. No, not like the mine in the photo. They looked more like torpedoes.
In August of 1972, Navy ships’ crews watched while these mines detonated for no obvious reason. In reviewing archived and now declassified materials, the conclusion is that a magnetic solar storm on the order of a Carrington event caused the detonations.
Space Weather has published a report on the solar research involved in this. It is available as a pdf at this link: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018SW002024
This is one part of the abstract:
Abstract:
Today the extreme space weather events of early August 1972 are discussed as benchmarks for Sun-Earth transit times of solar ejecta (14.6 hr) and for solar energetic particle fluxes (10 MeV ion flux >70,000 cm?2·s?1·sr?1). Although the magnetic storm index, Dst, dipped to only ?125 nT, the magnetopause was observed within 5.2 RE and the plasmapause within 2 RE. Widespread electric and communication grid disturbances plagued North America late on 4 August. There was an additional effect, long buried in the Vietnam War archives that add credence to the severity of the storm impact: a nearly instantaneous, unintended detonation of dozens of sea mines south of Hai Phong, North Vietnam on 4 August 1972. The U.S. Navy attributed the dramatic event to magnetic perturbations of solar storms. Herein we discuss how such a finding is broadly consistent with terrestrial effects and technological impacts of the 4 August 1972 event and the propagation of major eruptive activity from the Sun to the Earth. We also provide insight into the solar, geophysical, and military circumstances of this extraordinary situation. In our view this storm deserves a scientific revisit as a grand challenge for the space weather community, as it provides space?age terrestrial observations of what was likely a Carrington?class storm.
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The original and now declassified report from 1972 is held in Texas Tech University’s Vietnam archives. It is 143 pages long, divided into 3 pdfs, if you want to read it.
The pdfs are at this link: https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/83295
Title: U.S. Navy Report, Mine Warfare Project Office – The Mining of North Vietnam, 8 May 1972 to 14 January 1973
Item Number: 1070416001
A Carrington event refers to the extreme solar storm and flare that overheated telegraph wires, which were noninsulated copper, and set some telegraph offices on fire. The solar storm of 1859 was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, September 1–2, 1859.
Things have changed considerably since then, including several solar CMEs that just missed our planet by a hair.
As everything moves more and more toward high-end technology dependent on what are essentially radio signals, there is widespread speculation on what will happen to all of that technojunk that people depend on now. Maybe the old-fashioned windup stuff isn’t so dated, after all.
Category: Historical, Navy
#SpaceForce got this
there is a reason i still pay 120 usd a month for a landline still 😉 learned the hard way when the towers with all of their radio transmitters went down on 9/11
$120/ month??? With fast internet, I hope.
Contrary to my expectation, it was the landline which went out last January (in eastern NC) when the snow-pack aided low temperatures dipped below +10 degrees F; they may have gone out at +15. I didn’t write it down so I don’t remember precisely. (Yeah, cue the quote from “Debt of Honor” by Tom Clancy—if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen.)
Mines have come a long way since the moored, contact ones as depicted. Nowadays they are mostly bottomed, and can be triggered acoustically, magnetically, or by ship count.
Ship count is the most insidious; the shipping lane would be considered safe, as several ships have already passed through. Boom!
There may have been a deep water ‘torpedo-in-a-mine’ meant to snag passing submarines.
Or not.
How about we go back and remine that harbor and get better results. Forget Hell No!
Well, I’ll be damned. I have been losing sleep wondering why those damned things were exploding. This all makes perfect sense now.
I Remember when Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor in 72. I was just a teenager. Pissed off the Russians who had several ships docked there. He was showing the North that we weren’t playing around anymore, and yet, we still lost. I did not know they were exploding for no discernible reason.
Had to be a hell of a surprise when all that shit lit off at once!
So this Carrington fella was having some kind of affair that caused his fluxing particles to be ejected all over the place by the light of flares when the sun was shining. Was Stormy Daniel’s face involved? Did he want a cigarette and a nap afterward? Who slept in the wet spot? Do I have to worry about mine? Do we put the mine in the coconut? What was that rustle, rustle?
A twisted pair tied down to an outside network interface going to terminal in a hardened central office always gives the best phone.
Analog landline all the way to the CO is superb audio quality compared to todays digital networks. Soon as it goes through the a/d converter the quality turns to shit.
Just listen to a talk radio show with all the call ins from Iphones. Sounds like shit and the host says so as he goes on to the next caller. The next caller sounds like shit as well.
He probably had a brandy and a cigar. Stormy does age well, doesn’t she, considering that it was 1859?
I found it this morning on Watts Up With That. It caught my eye because we’re in a solar minimum right now, and over the past couple of years, the Sun has had some major eruptions, then went back to quiet state.
I was surprised that TTU has the archived material on it in their files.
So, a question for anyone who was in the Viet Nam theater back when this happened: Do you remember anything strange happening to the electronics? While much of the military electronics was still in the vacuum tube era, there were some integrated circuits beginning to show up.
There have been discussions elsewhere of the potential of another Carrington event bringing down the US electrical grid, or frying all the computers. I’m curious if any other effects showed up during this event in 1972.
BOOM!
I remember when they did the analysis on Belenko’s MiG-25, and laughed when they saw the radio still used vacuum tubes. Until it was pointed out that tube radios are hugely more resistant to EMP than later-construction stuff using solid state, surface mount etc. construction