Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the defining events of the Cold War. Unknown to even the most historically minded was another event that occurred on November 9th, exactly ten years earlier. This event could have meant the end of the Berlin Wall as well as civilization as we know it. What happened follows: As he recounted it to me, Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the Presidents decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes …. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that … 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to call the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system. -- Robert M. Gates. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insiders Story of Five Presidents and How they Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996),114. The series of alarming incidents and telephone phone calls recounted by former NSC staffer (and later CIA director and future Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates took place in the middle of the night on 9 November 1979. Because of the potentially grave implications of the event, the episode quickly leaked to the media, with the Washington Post and The New York Times printing stories on what happened. According to press reports, based on Pentagon briefings, a NORAD staffer caused the mistake by mistakenly loading a training/exercise tape into a computer, which simulated an attack into the live warning system. This was a distortion because it was not a matter of a wrong tape, but software simulating a Soviet missile attack then testing NORADs 427M computers was inexplicably transferred into the regular warning display at the Commands headquarters. Indeed, NORADs Commander-in-chief later acknowledged that the precise mode of failure … could not be replicated. www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb371/
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 21:37:15 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015