The other day, Senator John McCain called Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, “a thug, a bully, and a murderer,” adding that anyone who “describes him as anything else is lying.” Other members of Congress have attacked Putin for trying to influence the Presidential election. Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started by mistake are low-and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war. “Command and Control” focusses on near-catastrophic errors and accidents in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended in 1991. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, could be annihilated inadvertently.
WYOMING NUCLEAR SILO SCARE SOFTWARE
But the failure of a nuclear command-and-control system can have consequences far more serious than the crash of an online dating site from too much traffic or flight delays caused by a software glitch. They are designed, built, installed, maintained, and operated by human beings. My book “Command and Control” explores how the systems devised to govern the use of nuclear weapons, like all complex technological systems, are inherently flawed. telephone switch in Black Forest, Colorado. During the Cold War, false alarms were also triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty A.T. PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL CHELSEY / GETTY PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL CHELSEY / GETTYĪ similar false alarm had occurred the previous year, when someone mistakenly inserted a training tape, featuring a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack, into one of NORAD’s computers. The NORAD headquarters, in Colorado Springs.
Odom apologized-it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.īrzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly Washington might be destroyed within minutes. President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Air Force ballistic-missile crews removed their launch keys from the safes, bomber crews ran to their planes, fighter planes took off to search the skies, and the Federal Aviation Administration prepared to order every airborne commercial airliner to land.
The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, and the animosity between the two superpowers was greater than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National Military Command Center, beneath the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command ( NORAD), deep within Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at Site R, the Pentagon’s alternate command post center hidden inside Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania, issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear attack on the United States.
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