Armageddon and Paranoia by Rodric Braithwaite

Author:Rodric Braithwaite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Accidents Will Happen

Human agency – misjudgement, miscommunication, ill-considered risk-taking – was not the only trigger of crisis (these are described in Chapter 13). There were many lesser near-crises, false alarms, and technical accidents associated with nuclear weapons and their systems of command and control. Some were rectified because of their inbuilt fail-safe systems; some by human intervention; some by good luck. None resulted in a nuclear explosion.

False Warnings

In November 1979 American military computers appeared to show that a massive Soviet nuclear strike was imminent, aimed at the US command system and nuclear forces. Minuteman control centres were warned to stand by, interceptors took off, and the President’s ‘doomsday plane’ – the flying command post from which he could if necessary manage a nuclear war – was launched, though without the President on board. The alert was cancelled after six minutes when early warning satellites and radars showed no sign of an attack.

What had happened was that an exercise tape simulating an attack had accidentally been put into the Strategic Air Command’s operational computer system.The air force took remedial measures which, Congress was told, would ‘guarantee that [a similar incident] could never recur’. The General Accounting Office said, slightly less categorically, ‘this type of false alert should not recur’.

The Russians picked it up. Leonid Brezhnev wrote secretly to President Carter that the erroneous alert was ‘fraught with a tremendous danger … I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters’. Carter replied that the accusations were ‘inaccurate and unacceptable’, language which Marshall Shulman, the State Department’s adviser on Soviet affairs, thought ‘snotty’ and ‘gratuitously insulting … false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence’. There was a ‘complacency about handling them that disturbs me’.43

Another false alert occurred within a year. On 3 June 1980 military computers again indicated a major missile attack. Bomber crews started their engines. Minuteman bases stood by. Once again the alert ended when radars showed no evidence of an attack.

Three days later it happened again. This time the warning went almost to the top. Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awakened at three in the morning by his military assistant, William Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. The President had no more than ten minutes to order retaliation, but Brzezinski wanted confirmation before disturbing him. Odom rang back to say that the previous report was wrong: 2,200, not 250, missiles were on the way. Brzezinski was about to call the President, when Odom rang yet again. Other warning systems had shown no confirmation of a Soviet attack. Brzezinski had not bothered to wake his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour anyway.44

The post-mortem revealed that a computer chip had failed. The colonel who had called the alert was sacked. Thereafter his function was assigned to generals only, on the principle that colonels may make mistakes, but generals never do. Thirty years later, the US Air Force was still using the same computers.

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