November 1981 - November 2, 1981 (Monday)

November 2, 1981 (Monday)

• At the U.S. Polaris nuclear submarine base at the Holy Loch in Scotland, a Poseidon missile slipped from a crane that was transferring the weapon from the floating drydock USS Los Alamos to the submarine tender USS Holland. The missile fell 17 feet without incident, although the magazine New Statesman reported in its November 27 issue that the missile had ten nuclear warheads, that there had been the risk of an explosion that could have released a large radioactive cloud, and that the crews had been evacuated. Although the story has sometimes been retold as an incident where "we almost nuked Scotland" and that the fully armed Poseidon missile "did not detonate, but it could have", the magazine itself emphasized that "The risk was not thermonuclear explosion but detonation in the fierce, sensitive chemical explosives of the warhead trigger-system" that would have released a radioactive cloud.
• Born: Tatiana Totmianina, Russian pair figure skater, two-time world champion and Olympic gold medalis; in Perm; and Katharine Isabelle, Canadian actress, in Vancouver
• Died: Kenneth Oakley, 70, English anthropologist whose testing exposed the Piltdown Man as a fraud.