I knew war was close many times. Personally my scariest time was when the intelligence ship Pueblo was seized. At that point all the planes at the local US Air Force station were put on high alert and sent to circle the valley fully armed. All day and night and probably well into the next day flights of planes would come in for refueling but kept their weapons airborne to strike. It was a very visible signal of how close humanity was to destroying itself.
I knew about the gaffs and mistakes like the time that a nuclear strike practice tape was mistakenly loaded at SAC headquarters and decision-makers had to make a life-and-death decision whether to launch an all out nuclear attack. I knew about the early SAGE system where radar signals bouncing off the moon was mistaken for a Russian attack and humans-in-the-loop made the right decision and prevented a nuclear strike. But I didn't know about the stories from the other side.
Today I learned of one from reading Brad DeLong's website that then sent me off to read the Wikipedia article on Stanislav Petrov. Here is the relevant bit:
Stanislav Petrov, an Air Defence lieutenant colonel, was the officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow on September 26, 1983. Petrov's responsibilities included observing the satellite early warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union. If notification was received from the early-warning systems that inbound missiles had been detected, the Soviet Union's strategy was an immediate nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning), specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.The sad fact is that most people today think that nuclear war is "not possible". In reality it is even more likely now because there are so many more nuclear armed states. Humanity is incredibly lucky that we haven't annihilated ourselves. George Bush's presidency increased the likelihood of nuclear armageddon many-fold over. Hopefully with Obama in office governments will re-start negotiations and move us away from the precipice of nuclear war before some accident causes the unthinkable to happen.
Shortly after midnight, the bunker's computers reported that an intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the US. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a United States first-strike nuclear attack would hypothetically involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches to disable any Soviet means for a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system's reliability had been questioned in the past. Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union's land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union's response time to minutes.
Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system's indications a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarms had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error later corrected with cross-reference to a geostationary satellite.
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