Andøya is maybe best known for its Andøya Rocket Range, where scientists from all over Europe come to see their research rockets being launched. In 1995 one of these rocket launches almost started a nuclear doomsday. For 24 minutes the Russians thought that they were under nuclear attack from the US when their radars detected a rocket. The Russians mistook the science rocket as a Trident missile from a US submarine. A Trident missile would take only 10 minutes to reach Moscow, so there were little time to investigate and identify the rocket. President Boris Yeltsin activated his "nuclear briefcase" and his generals urged Yeltsin to launch the counter attack. But Yeltsin hesitated. He couldn't believe that the West would attack Russia, and this hesitation probably saved us from a nuclear apocalypse. 24 minuted after the rocket was launched, it fell into the ocean near Spitsbergen, just as intended. And for the record, the Russians had been informed that a rocket would be launched on that day at that time, but obviously communication were not all that good in Russia. This little known incident has been said to be much more severe than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But enough of this anecdote. Below is my travel plan the next four days.
