The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk collides with a Soviet attack submarine. The submarine is carrying nuclear armed torpedoes, and the carrier is armed with several dozen nuclear weapons.

Iraqi warplanes attack Iran's Bushehr nuclear power complex.

The Pentagon conducts a rigged Star Wars test, in which an experimental rocket intercepts an electronically coded ICBM about 100 miles above the earth. The ICBM had been secretly modified to make it easier to track. The fraudulent experiment, authorized by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, was purportedly to deceive the Soviets, but also deceives Congress, who resultingly authorizes approximately $30 billion for the Strategic Defense Initiative over the next nine years.

It is revealed that South Africa has been receiving offers as a radioactive dump site by several firms in various countries, including the United States.

The U.S. and the USSR expand and improve their Hot Line.

South Africa and the International Atomic Energy Agency continue safeguard negotiations that were broken off several years earlier. 

The Reagan Administration reports that the Soviet Union has violated several arms control treaties. President Reagan uses this report to openly consider American abrogation of the still not ratified Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).