From Vox during the week. Mentioned this in passing last year, but this week is the fortieth anniversary of an event that could have had incalculable consequences... One individual played a near heroic role.
On September 26, 1983, the planet came terrifyingly close to a nuclear holocaust.
The Soviet Union's missile attack early warning system displayed, in large red letters, the word "LAUNCH"; a computer screen stated to the officer on duty, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, that it could say with "high reliability" that an American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet Union. First, it was just one missile, but then another, and another, until the system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched.
"Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike?" my then-colleague Max Fisher explained. "If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US."
And:
Reporting it would have made a certain degree of sense. The Reagan administration had a far more hardline stance against the Soviets than the Carter, Ford, or Nixon administrations before it. Months earlier President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative(mockingly dubbed "Star Wars," a plan to shoot down ballistic missiles before they reached the US), and his administration was in the process of deploying Pershing II nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, which were capable of striking the Soviet Union. There were reasons for Petrov to think Reagan's brinkmanship had escalated to an actual nuclear exchange.
But Petrov did not report the incoming strike. He and others on his staff concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. And it was; the system mistook the sun's reflection off clouds for a missile. Petrov prevented a nuclear war between the Soviets, who had 35,804 nuclear warheads in 1983, and the US, which had 23,305.
Vox mentions two other instances: One with Vasili Arkhipov of the Soviet navy on board a nuclear submarine off Cuba in 1962 who dissented with two other colleagues as to whether a war had started, after US Navy vessels dropped depth charges on them, and prevented a launch. The other perhaps less likely hero is Boris Yeltsin as recently as January 1995 who declined to respond to what turned out to be a false alarm.
This isn't a one-way dynamic. As this notes here, US forces experienced false alerts too.
Although a middle-of-the-nighr phone call does not fit those circumstance, it does fit the false alarm on 3 June 1980, which occurred in the very early morning period after midnight. During the half-hour before defense officials agreed there was an error, radar screens at the Pentagon and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) had shown that 200 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and then 2020 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were heading toward North America. Yet, no such data appeared on warning screens at NORAD.
The incident on 3 June 1980 was the third false alert since November 1979. The November incident was widely reported and alarmed the Soviet leadership, which lodged a complaint with Washington about the "extreme danger" of false warnings. While Pentagon officials were trying to prevent future incidents, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown warned President Carter that false warnings were virtually inevitable, although he tried to reassure the president that "human safeguards" would prevent them from getting out of control.
And how's this for thought-provoking:
- Causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."
Or this.
We've been lucky. So far.
No comments:
Post a Comment