It was 3 a.m. on November 9, 1979, when the bedside telephone of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to US President Jimmy Carter, started ringing alarmingly. On the line was William Odom, one of Brzezinski's military aides. “The Soviet Union has launched 250 nuclear missiles in our direction,” Odom said hastily. Brzezinski flew out of bed and hurried to his study.
Brzezinski knew he had to act quickly. According to the scripts, which Brzezinski knew by heart, the president had no more than seven minutes to give the order for a counterattack. Before calling the president awake, he wanted a second confirmation that it was indeed a missile attack and a list of possible targets.
Because he thought it unlikely that the president would no order a counter-attack, he ordered his assistant to call back within a minute with confirmation that the planes of the Strategic Air Command – a special division of the air force that should mount the counter-attack – would already take off.
Odom called back within a minute. “Mr. Brzezinski, it's not about 250 missiles. It concerns at least 2200 nuclear warheads! This is a devastating attack!” Washington was obviously a target. Brzezinski realized that he and everyone around him would be dead in less than fifteen minutes. He had already picked up the receiver to alert the president when his phone rang for the third time.
This time, Odom reported that other radar systems failed to detect the Soviet missiles. His heart was still pounding in his throat as Brzezinski sank slowly into his chair and stared out at the peacefully lit streets outside his office. Within a minute, he had called President Carter and advised him to launch a counterattack. Just in time it became clear that it was a false alarm.
Nevertheless, it turned out later that ten fighters had already taken off. Also the National Emergency Airborne Command Post – a flying command post from which the president could control the country in the event of an acute threat of war – was already in the air, albeit without the president or the secretary of defense on board.
A few days later, the US Department of Defense announced at a well-attended press conference that an employee had accidentally loaded an exercise tape into the computer. However, it soon became apparent that this simple explanation was not correct, and the commander of NORAD (the military service responsible for surveillance of American airspace) had to admit that the exercise software had been loaded into the computers in 'inexplicable way'.
Urgent message
It all looks like a terrifying scenario from a Hollywood disaster movie, but during the Cold War, the world has been on the brink of large-scale conflict far more often than is commonly known. This is apparent from previously secret documents that American researchers of the National Security Archive recently published on its own website. The failure of automated warning systems on the American side was a regular occurrence.
One of the documents shows that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev even sent an urgent personal message to Washington following the incident on November 9, 1979. He was concerned about the "careless mistake on the American side, which lurks enormous danger." He added:“You will agree with me that we cannot afford to make mistakes in this area.”
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The warnings were only partially successful. Six months later, on June 3 and 6, 1980, when tensions rose between the major powers because of the unexpected Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, things went wrong again. The computers again indicated that "hundreds" of missiles were threatening US territory. This time, however, the warnings did not reach the top of the Carter administration and the false report was seen through before any planes took off.
In one of the released documents, Defense Secretary Harold Brown explains to President Carter what went wrong. There is said to be a software bug in NORAD's warning system. The US airspace watchdog regularly sent automated messages to the military command center. By default, the messages contain the message that 000 missiles have been launched. Instead of a 0, a 2 was sometimes entered 'inexplicably', so that it read 002 or 200. Enough reason for the army to send planes into the air as a precaution.
Dangerous chain reaction
These kinds of computer errors were "inevitable," Brown said, but he assured the president that there is always human control over the automated systems. However, Brown declined to respond to questions from journalists as to whether an alert response to a false alarm would not be picked up by the Soviets, setting off a dangerous chain reaction of responding to each other's misunderstandings. "Let's hope the Russians have as high a human control mechanism as we do," said an anonymous US defense official.
What's even more disturbing is that we now know that the Russian warning system actually worked the other way around. In the 1980s, the Russians were particularly concerned that the US would unexpectedly carry out a "decapitation attack" aimed at quickly taking out the political and military top in the Kremlin. Some officers deep in a bunker could therefore launch intercontinental missiles (ICBMs), possibly loaded with nuclear warheads, without further permission from the top, if specific conditions were met – such as failure to contact the leaders.
During the Cold War, both the Americans and the Russians were aware that carrying out a nuclear attack meant mutual destruction, in which no one had anything to gain. It is therefore not surprising that the political top of both countries has never seriously considered this decision.
The fact that the nuclear arsenal of both superpowers was controlled by (in contemporary eyes) primitive computer systems that, moreover, regularly failed, turns out to be a much greater threat in retrospect. And there's no doubt much more to be revealed about these kinds of computer glitches, which at times made a devastating war frighteningly close.