At 3:00am on November 9, 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
a national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, was awoken by a terrifying phone call.
According to North American Aerospace Defense Command or
NORAD officials, the Soviet Union had just launched hundreds of ballistic
missiles with a direct trajectory for the continental United States.
America was about to be nuked by Russia.
In retaliation for this alarm, all air defense interceptors were activated,
and at least ten warplanes took to the sky, including the president's doomsday plane.
Even a few air traffic controllers were ordered to ground all commercial aircraft immediately.
Still, at no point were POTUS or the Secretary of Defense notified.
In the 1979 NORAD alert, a mix of Soviet-inspired paranoia, human error, and early computer
technology caused a nearly catastrophic blunder at the United States' top missile defense compound,
leading to one of the closest calls of the Cold War...
False Alarms
Ever since the dawn of the nuclear age, American and Soviet military commanders
have incorporated increasingly elaborate technology into atomic weapons and their
delivery systems to minimize the risk of accidental or unauthorized launches.
One example was a hotline between Washington and Moscow, installed in 1963 to reduce the risk of
misunderstandings between the two world powers, as well as the Pentagon Ballistic Missile Early
Warning System or BMEW, which provided about 15 minutes of warning time before a strike.
Still, false alarms have continually occurred throughout the years, including when a BMEW radar
in Greenland picked up on echoes from the Moon and generated a false report of a missile attack.
By 1972, the North American Aerospace Command or NORAD,
a combined organization between the United States and Canada, began implementing complex
network warning systems operated from its headquarters in the Colorado mountains.
Still, like all early technology, the complex computer system had a risk of failure or error.
Such false warnings had the potential to ignite an inadvertent war due to
an unpredicted sequence of events that became a real threat to the entire world.
While details about Soviet false alarms are relatively unknown due to the nation's secrecy,
many such accidents are known to have occurred in America,
even as most remained classified for years until the end of the Cold War.
Still, a rare false alert about an impending missile
attack in 1979 actually reached the public, causing mayhem and chaos.
An All-Out Attack
On the early morning of November 9, 1979, North American Aerospace Defense Command analysts in
Colorado were shocked to see their monitors light up with alarming news: the Soviet Union
had launched hundreds of nuclear ballistic missiles at the continental United States.
Unlike previous false warnings that operators at NORAD had experienced before, this alarm also made
its way to locations plugged into the Worldwide Military Command and Control System or Wimex,
the military's 1960s sophisticated software that connected far-flung outposts of American
strategic defense and provided data from satellites and perimeter radar.
The Wimex system was so sophisticated and processed defense data so quickly
that it had automated authority to unilaterally issue preparations for war.
In addition, this time, the alert was also blaring in multiple defense offices,
including the Strategic Air Command Center, the Pentagon National Military Command Center,
and the Alternate National Military Command Center.
It all indicated that a full-scale nuclear attack was coming.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser,
was immediately awakened in the middle of the night by a series of phone calls
from a military assistant, beginning with a briefing informing him of the incoming threat.
Knowing that Carter's decision time to issue a retaliation order was from three to seven minutes,
Brzezinski told the military assistant that he would stand by until he received further
confirmation about the Soviet launch before calling the American leader.
Minutes later, he was told that more than 2,500 missiles were indeed approaching.
Preparations
The information on the monitors quickly led to defensive actions.
In response, missile crews and air-defense systems were put on heightened alert,
nuclear bomber crews were deployed, and almost a dozen fighter-interceptor planes were launched.
Moreover, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, used for the president to control American
forces during a nuclear conflict, was launched from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland,
but without President Carter or Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.
As Brzezinski quietly paced around in his house,
waiting for further details to finally contact Carter, he received a third phone call.
According to a military officer on the other side of the line, the United States' early warning
systems, which measure scientific readings like seismic activity and other phenomena,
were not reporting anything related to ground-based ballistic missile launches.
Additional software checks ultimately revealed the truth:
the scare had been a false alarm, and there were no incoming missiles.
In the book ‘From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How they
Won the Cold War,’ written by Robert M Gates, he described the National Security adviser's
experience with the November 9 blunder as told by former staffers: [QUOTE] "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."
Media Coverage
Due to the alarm's severe implications, the incident quickly leaked to the media, with major
news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times printing stories on the incident.
The latter even published a whole retelling of the event on November 11, 1979.
In the text, the newspaper acknowledged that a false alert triggered some of the
nation's war defenses against a nonexistent missile attack.
Had the six-minute-long alert lasted for one more minute, the Pentagon sources on the story claimed
that the information would have definitely been shared with the President or Secretary of Defense.
The story also remarked that the incident warranted a military response, stating:
[QUOTE] "As a result, 10 jet interceptors from three bases in the United States and Canada
scrambled aloft, and missile throughout the nation went on low‐level alert."
Still, like all other records, the story confirmed that the alert was
deemed insufficiently urgent to warrant a presidential or military top brass
notification. According to the article's sources, the warning was not deemed urgent
enough to warrant notifying top government or defense officials.
Evidently, no one wanted to warn the reporters and further scare the American public, and thus
the phone call went to security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a more or less mid-level employee.
While a spokesman for the Pentagon stated that the United States military
was satisfied with the response to the threat of November 9, the false alarm did raise an
immediate outcry from British legislators vehemently opposed to nuclear weapons.
Still, the White House press secretary, Jody Powell,
dismissed all criticism of the NORAD incident.
Russian Response
The behind-the-scenes story of the what-if incident became even more
complicated once Soviet leadership learned about the false warning.
The Soviet Supreme was offended enough to lodge a formal complaint with Washington.
On November 14, Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev, alarmed about the extreme dangers
of a false nuclear warning, issued a statement via Ambassador Anatoly Dobyrnin regarding the matter.
The Soviet Supreme's callous message regarding the NORAD incident, which was unclassified after the
Cold War had ended, read: [QUOTE] “Mr. President, I think it is quite understandable that the said
fact should cause a feeling of extreme anxiety in the mind of every state leader who is responsible
for the policy of his country. It is reported that an unforeseen error has occurred. Let it be so.
But a false signal of nuclear missile attack did take place. And this is fraught with a tremendous
danger. What kind of mechanism it is which allows the possibility of such incidents? [...]”
The report also included a scathing reference to America's presidential management.
According to Brezhnev, the Western world could have found itself on the
brink of unimaginable peril without the knowledge of top United States leaders.
While the statement recognized that human error was to blame for the incident,
it also stated that it should have never happened in the first place.
Finally, the message ended with a warning from the Russians: [QUOTE]
"I think you will agree that there should be no errors in such matters. They must be completely
excluded, not 99 but 100 percent. Although now references are made to the fact that the
error occurred due to a computer fault, it is clear that in the final analysts,
appropriate decisions were made by people. I could not help, Mr. President, drawing your secret."
According to the Communist leader's message,
such a callous human error would never happen under his regime.
In retaliation to the incendiary message, Pentagon officials replied that the Kremlin
had used erroneous information to redact such assertions and confirmed that Moscow
had nothing to worry about, as United States forces always had the situation under control.
Investigation
After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the false alarm resulted from a mistake
made by a military officer and the failure of United States defense computers to recognize it.
The documents stated that a lieutenant colonel at the NORAD headquarters in
Colorado was given access to the wrong machine, and the unknown
officer erroneously punched a war-games tape into a missile-warning component of Wimex.
As such, the system was unable to tell the difference between a drill and reality.
Still, the precise mode of failure could not be replicated.
Harold Brown, who was later uncovered as the guilty military officer,
called National Security Adviser Brzezinski and explained to President Carter that he should be
prepared for another unrelated malfunction in case it generated another false alert.
According to Brown, to counter the inevitable future incidents, the Defense Department should
heavily rely on the human element of the nation’s missile attack warning system.
Aftermath
At the time of the November 9 incident, tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union were relatively low and, according to later accounts, there was some skepticism
about the strange warning from the beginning, especially as communication between the warning
center and American radar sites indicated that the machines were not picking up on a missile attack.
Within months of the incident, however, tensions spiked between the two world
powers when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979,
and the friction continued to rise as President Ronald Reagan took over the country’s leadership.
Still, had communication systems been down at the time, or had the radars detected unrelated missile
launches or similar activity, the November 9 incident could have become a real tragedy.
According to a congressional investigator,
the size of the alleged attack would have made Pearl Harbor look like a Sunday picnic.
In the months following the 1979 NORAD alert, United States warning systems generated three
more false alarms, including one on May 28, June 3, and June 6, all in 1980.
The Pentagon claimed that the cause of the malfunctions was a failed
46-cent micro-electronic integrated circuit and faulty message design.
Moreover, declassified documents on the incident and other false warnings of Soviet
missile attacks delivered to the Pentagon and military commands by computers at NORAD in 1979
and 1980 were published for the first time by the National Security Archive in recent years.
Today, the 1979 NORAD alert is recognized as a sobering reminder
of the potentially dangerous mixture of human error and computer war machines.
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