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The Day a Soviet Nuclear Satellite Crashed into the Canadian North

Decades later, a mystery still hangs over what the fiery descent of Cosmos 954 left behind

Early one morning, on January 24, 1978, Marie Roman was giving the new CBC building at the south end of Yellowknife a very thorough cleaning. We had moved into the new space a few months before. Everybody loved the sweep of the huge windows on the second floor, spanning ninety degrees from the southwest to the northeast.

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Roman would have been looking south when a fiery, orange ball, with a long blazing tail, came out of the morning sky on her right, westerly, and streaked across on a very low and descending pitch. She couldn’t hear it, and in about a minute, it disappeared in the northeast. She was sure it must have crashed just beyond Yellowknife, likely in Great Slave Lake.

Others, including two Mounties, had also seen the fireball and immediately filed a report. At the big open-pit, lead and zinc Pine Point Mine, 200 kilometres across Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife, miners were staring northward, watching the fireball descend in the west and drop out of sight a few minutes later in the northeast. Gordon Graham, one of the miners, told me in 2021 that he didn’t know what it was, but he knew it would soon crash, perhaps near Fort Reliance, a small Dene community forty kilometres away.

We would soon learn that the flaming tailings belonged to a runaway Soviet satellite which had crashed in the Northwest Territories. The massive search began at that very moment, lasting several months. Only 1 percent of Cosmos 954 would be recovered—the biggest piece that had plowed into a bank of the Thelon River.

What happened to the rest of it is still a mystery. It may be fairly stated that the same percentages apply in determining what had happened: 1 percent of the questions were answered, and 99 percent of the most critical ones burned up in the atmosphere, as it were.

Russia had designed and launched Cosmos 954 in September 1977 to monitor ocean traffic, particularly North Atlantic Treaty Organization vessels and nuclear submarines. Two months later, the Americans knew the satellite was out of control and began following the bouncing ball upward and downward in its orbit, constantly tracking, recording, and calculating every wobble and shift with their spy satellites.

Through December and into January, they grew more and more concerned as it became increasingly clear that 954 would crash in North America, and they knew the potentially lethal dangers it packed in the fifty kilos—100 pounds—of enriched uranium 235 that powered the nuclear reactor. Uranium 235 was known inside and outside nuclear circles as the same deadly force packed into “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Eight days before Cosmos’s re-entry, the Cold War took a short recess. Talking to each other and to other allies, the Russians and the Americans shared enough secrets to confirm there was much to be concerned about. If the Cosmos 954 reactor disintegrated over a major city, like Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York, the catastrophe would be unimaginable. The Russians needed to convince the Americans that this was a reactor spinning out of control, not a nuclear bomb. They needed that fact understood and accepted, lest the satellite crash spark a nuclear counterattack against them.

Canada came into the inner circle only four days before the re-entry, when Canadian Forces Base Edmonton was put on alert. Like the Americans, the Canadian military had ninety-six precious hours to assemble detection, cleanup and recovery equipment, and crews and then load everything and everyone on its airplanes.

Canada had Hercules transport planes. The United States had four fully equipped and loaded C-141 transport planes, with twice the........

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