In 1980, attitudes between the United States and the Soviet Union were less than friendly. The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, sparking a conflict that would last a decade, in response, America enacted a trade embargo against the USSR, and boycotted the Summer Olympics held in Moscow. It was also election time in the US, and the public was on edge over 52 Americans held hostage in the US’s Tehran embassy, causing a surge in national anxiety, turning the ongoing election towards the starkly anti-communist candidate, Ronald Reagan. Relations were at the lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. — Ronald Reagan (source)

Like any other moment from the Cold War, the threat of nuclear Armageddon was in the back of everybody’s mind. Of course, nobody had thought more about that than the governments controlling the warheads, but what troubled them more than anything was being unable to launch their weapons. What happens when the enemy quickly hits with a ‘decapitation strike’ and eliminates the head of state?

The Soviet Union ostensibly solved this conundrum by creating an autonomous system to launch all ICBMs at the moment a nuclear strike is detected, known as Dead Hand. It would be activated during particularly tense moments, and when it received a positive identification from a network of seismic, light, and radioactivity sensors – all indicating a nuclear strike – it would launch all missiles.

The American fix was less mechanical. They decided that they would strike before the nation was hit: the launch order would be given after missiles were detected but before they had actually struck. This was known as Launch on Warning. Such a policy would force the command structure to make a decision in less than fifteen minutes, and placed an enormous amount of faith in their Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (or BMEWS). All the BMEWS radar stations were linked to a central intelligence centre, that was also given a needlessly overlong title – the North American Aerospace Defense Command (or NORAD), which collated intelligence from various sources to summarise for the entrusted decision makers. NORAD’s headquarters itself was also connected to several other agencies which would need to respond quickly in the face of nuclear attack.

Such was the requirement to make sure that the enemy could never strike out of total surprise, and without being struck back: “you nuke us and we’ll nuke you”, or to give it the proper name: Mutually Assured Destruction. Abbreviated as M.A.D., appropriately. The theory did make sense though, nobody with any reason would see a justification to end the human race in a war which could only be lost. Unfortunately for game theorists, the assumption made is that every actor is intelligent enough to never make an obviously-poor decision. When you begin replacing the actors with flawed machines, this assumption becomes false.

* * *

Shortly after midnight, on June 3rd, the president’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, is awoken by a telephone call. On the line is General William Odom, who promptly tells him that NORAD has detected 220 missiles heading toward the United States. They would begin arriving in anywhere between 7 to 15 minutes. Brzeziński wasn’t an impulsive man and calmly tells him to call back once he has absolutely sure confirmation.

The General had also sent the alert to SAC crews all over the United States. The SAC (Strategic Air Command) were responsible for the majority of the US’s nuclear stockpile, including the launch silos. Most of the American ICBMs of the time were Minuteman-IIIs, topped with three W62 warheads per missile. Having three warheads per missile enabled the ICBM to split into three small projectiles high above the Earth, and fall back down to strike multiple cities at once. These W62 warheads are each 8 times per powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, with a yield of 170Kt to the Fat Man‘s 21Kt.

Brzeziński’s phone rings again, and once more, it’s General Odom. As the clock had been ticking away, the number had quickly risen: there were now 2200 missiles on their way – a tenfold increase. If the US didn’t launch their retaliation soon, they wouldn’t be able to. Brzeziński ends the call, keeps the receiver in his hand, and prepares to dial the president. In line with the American doctrine, this should have been the last phone call he would ever make to the president.

The American launch procedure in 1980 required three things: the first two were the keys stored in a red safe in the ICBM silo’s control centre, that fitted two keyholes at either side of the room, which needed to be inserted at the same time, and held in for several seconds. The latter was a 6 digit authorisation code.

Only the president knew the correct authorisation code. If the United States decided to launch their nuclear weapons, the president would deliver a call to all silos across the country, announcing the 6 letters to enter into their consoles. Then, the crews input the code, insert their keys, and watch the silo door slowly open, and the missile would swiftly be gone.

As the call had come in from General Odom during the initial alert, each of these launch crews had opened their so-called “go-to-war safe”, ready to follow through on their launch procedure, they took out the two keys, and stood waiting for the president’s call.

Zbigniew Brzeziński tugs the dialling wheel of the telephone, adding number after number to the dialer that would connect him to the White House. The president likely doesn’t have any time to waste: he would need to be woken up, get out of bed, pick up the telephone, comprehend Brzeziński’s message, then he would need to broadcast the launch order, make it to a safe site, and then, lastly, alert the citizens of the United States of the situation – for all of this he would have, at most, about ten minutes.

But before Brzeziński can finish dialling, the phone rings again, and it’s the General for the third time. Odom explains that while NORAD had seen the warning on their computer, other individual sensors did not trip any alarms. Aside from NORAD’s system, no other source claimed a nuclear attack was taking place. Evidently, something had gone wrong.

So the apocalypse was postponed, the president left to sleep, and technicians immediately began trying to locate the source of the problem. Brzeziński, meanwhile, returned to bed, where his wife was still sleeping – he had decided not to wake her, preferring that she die peacefully than awake.

The problem at NORAD was not tracked down until three days later, when the command centre received the same alert. This time, a pattern was noticed: the numbers of incoming missiles all involved the number 2. In order to test NORAD’s network, they would periodically send test signals, containing an incoming missile count of ‘000’, which allowed NORAD to very quickly discover nodes which had communication problems. Simply due to a temperamental computer chip, when the alert was received at NORAD’s command center, the message was malformed, and twos were inserted into the message – a message reading ‘0 INCOMING MISSILES’ becomes ‘220 INCOMING MISSILES’. The faulty chip was soon replaced, and the test alert was changed from the empty ‘incoming missiles’ alert, to something which would always read benign.

This incident remained largely unknown until certain sources involved wrote books and autobiographies about their experiences in government and intelligence. These sources were more or less narrowly focused memoirs that told a whole story of an era or an organisation, and didn’t detail specific incidents. It came to public consciousness when Eric Schlosser put this information together whilst writing the famous Command and Control – the main source for this article. You can read the US government’s declassified reports on the false alarm here and here.

It serves as one of several close-call incidents which came to light in the US, and the equivalent problems almost certainly occurred in the Soviet Union, too. Without the freedom of information experienced outside of the Iron Curtain, we’ll probably never know how many close calls the USSR had. Were the Dead Hand system ever activated during the Cold War, we may have come frighteningly close to a likewise malfunctioning computer chip, which could have launched the entire Soviet arsenal at Western Europe and the United States… who knows? That kind of story would remain classified forever.

N.b. This took place on the 3rd of June in 1980, though many sources often incorrectly mix events and people with a similar incident on the 9th of November in 1979. The two events are not related. The 1979 alert was the result of an employee ‘inserting a wrong tape’, whilst the 1980 incident was a faulty computer chip.

Primary Source: Eric Schlosser (Command and Control).

Additional Sources: Air Mobility Command Museum; BBC; Cornell University; Encyclopedia Britannica; FCC; International Olympic Committee; NORAD; Nuclear Weapon Archive; Smithsonian; The New Yorker; The Washington Post; US Government via National Security Archive; Veritasium; Wired.