Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
and I love history. And if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
You might not think about November 9th, 1979 as being one of the most important dates in history,
and yet it honestly might have been. It might have been one of the most important
dates in world history. It might even have been the end of history. And what happened,
and what didn't happen, and the reason you probably never heard about it all
tell us something about the era. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
The idea that a nation can develop such a massive military potential that it makes war unthinkable,
the thing we today know is mutually assured destruction, goes farther back than you might
think. In fact, both Richard Gatling, who in 1862 invented the Gatling gun,
and Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite in 1867, suggested that their weapons were so destructive
that they might make war futile. The concept of using a nuclear bomb to deter someone else's use
of a nuclear bomb goes back to very earliest development of such weapons. In March of 1942,
scientists living in England, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls published an extraordinary
memorandum that was the first technical exposition of a practical nuclear weapon. In short,
their analysis of the critical mass needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction was much
smaller than had been previously theorized, small enough to incorporate into a practical bomb. In
addition to the scientific calculations, Frisch and Peierls talked about such a
bombs strategic potential. Arguing that, “If Germany were to develop such a weapon,
the most effective reply would be a counter threat, with a similar bomb.” The Frisch Peierls
memorandum was considered to be a prime motivation behind the Manhattan Project,
and both Frisch and Peierls would later be part of the team that produced the first atomic bombs.
After the Second World War, a new competition between the United States and its allies,
and the Soviet Union and its satellites began. The date of the official start of what came to be
called the Cold War is often seen as March 12th, 1947. The date that US President Harry S Truman
made a speech to the US Congress, enunciating the Truman Doctrine, an American foreign policy whose
stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion, arguing that it was a threat to the
national security of the United States. There is no specific date assigned to represent
the start of the nuclear arms race between the United States, and the Soviet Union that was a
centerpiece of the Cold War, although August 29th, 1949, the day of the Soviet Union first tested a
nuclear bomb, might be as good a day as any. The RDS-1, otherwise known as First Lightning,
had a yield of 22 kilotons of TNT, and surprised the West coming nearly four years earlier than
the US had expected the Soviets would be able to develop a nuclear bomb. By the mid-1950s, both
countries had develop much larger thermonuclear bombs, as well as heavy bombers such as the
Convair B-36 and the Tupolev Tu-95, that were capable of delivering these bombs well into each
other's territory. During the 1960's, not only did strategic bombers improve, but both the US
and the Soviet Union developed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and intercontinental ballistic
missiles, to deliver their ever more potent nuclear weapons. These delivery systems, strategic
bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles became what
was called the Nuclear Triad, and were part of a philosophy of Assured Destruction, described
by US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. In brief, McNamara argued that, “To deter
nuclear war, a threat of assured destruction was necessary.” “This required not only a nuclear
capacity, but so much nuclear capacity that even if an enemy were to use their nuclear weapons
in a hypothetical first strike, the ability to respond would remain. So that the destruction of
that enemy would still be assured.” “The purpose of having a three branch nuclear capability is
to significantly reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all of the nation's nuclear
forces in a first-strike attack. This in turn, ensures a credible threat of a second strike.”
New technologies, and uncertainty over each other's capabilities continue to drive the arms
race, as leaders on both sides worried about hypothetical missile gaps, or bomber gaps. It
was the financial demands of the arms race, and the concepts of massive retaliation, and assured
destruction that led President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1955, to change US military strategy,
in what became known as, The New Look. A policy which emphasized reliance on strategic nuclear
weapons to deter potential threats, thus allowing the nation to reduce the size of the conventional
Army, and Navy. As part of The New Look, the role of the United States Strategic Air Command,
or SAC, tasked with the air defense of the continental United States, was amended. Under
The New Look, the major purpose of air defense was not to shoot down enemy bombers, it was to
allow SAC bombers to get into the air, and not be destroyed on the ground, to allow for massive
retaliation. But survivability required more than planes and missiles. To truly allow survivability,
you have to have sufficient warning that an attack was coming. Thus, in 1957, the US and Canada
formed a joint military group called the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, whose
primary purpose was to provide an early warning and defense for SACs retaliatory forces. And NORAD
needed a hardened facility designed to protect its operations from Soviet attack. In May of 1961, the
US started to excavate underneath a nine thousand five hundred and seventy foot Colorado Mountain
to create the facility known as the Cheyenne Mountain complex. The complex became operational
in 1967 for a total cost of one hundred forty two point four million dollars, and monitored the
airspace of Canada and the United States through a worldwide early warning system for missiles,
space systems, and foreign aircraft. The five acre facility is built under 2,000 feet of granite,
and houses fifteen three-story buildings hidden behind 25 ton blast doors and mounted on giant
springs to keep them from shifting in the event of a nuclear blast. The bunker is built
to deflect a 30 Megaton nuclear explosion as close as two kilometers. At its height,
the tunnels of the Cheyenne Mountain complex hosted nearly 2,000 personnel. During the 1970s,
NORAD's early warning systems at the Cheyenne Mountain complex were not fully automated. In
1972 Cheyenne Mountain began to integrate those systems with what was called the
Cheyenne Mountain Complex Improvements Program 427-M, which became operational in 1979. 427-M
was a consolidated program for command center, ballistic missile, and space functions. Developed
using new software technology, and designed for computers with large processing capacity it was
intended to give greater reliability and quicker early warning capability.
And it was there in the early morning of November 9th 1979, in the world's most advanced bunker,
using the brand-new and robust early warning system, that the unthinkable happened. Decades
of strategy around massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction collapsed,
as the screens at the NORAD command center showed indisputably that America's worst nightmare had
occurred. The Soviet Union had launched an all-out nuclear attack on the United States,
designed to destroy our command functions, and our nuclear weapons.
This was no drill. The Pentagon's National Military Command Center, and the alternate
National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland, all showed the same thing. The Soviets
had launched more than 200 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Following standard procedures,
the launch control centers for America's 550 Minutemen 3, and 450 Minutemen 2 missiles,
missiles whose combined warheads represented approximately 55,000 times the explosive power
of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, were given a preliminary warning to prepare for a
counter-attack. The crews of the SAC ready alert bombers, and tankers were moved to
their aircraft. Emerging from the readiness crew buildings, commonly called Mole Holes,
to man their B-52 bombers, each armed with up to 20 nuclear tipped AGM 69 short-range attack
missiles, and start their engines. The entire continental air defense interceptor force,
fighter aircraft tasked to defend the United States, was put on alert. And at least 10
F-106 Delta Dart fighter interceptors were launched to protect US airspace. Finally,
the president's Doomsday Plane, the national emergency airborne command post was launched,
although without the President or Secretary of Defense on board. US National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski later recalled the event. He was awakened at 3:00 a.m. by a call from his
military assistant, Major General William Odom who informed him that 250 Soviet ballistic missiles
were headed to the United States. Brzezinski knew that the president's decision time to
order retaliation was just three to seven minutes. They were still waiting for satellite confirmation
of the launch, and Brzezinski did not want to call the President until that confirmation,
but asked to confirm that SAC was launching its planes! A moment later, Odom called back to inform
him that the command center was reporting that the Soviets had now launched over 2,200 missiles,
an all-out nuclear attack! As Brzezinski prepared to call the president he made a silent decision
of his own, he chose not to wake his wife. If the world was going to end in half an hour,
he would let her go quietly in her sleep. Moments before he picked up the phone to call President
Jimmy Carter, and recommend massive retaliation, Odom called a third time. Raw data from the early
warning satellites and ground-based radar were seeing nothing. It was, apparently, a false alarm.
Later it was determined that software simulating a Soviet nuclear attack intended to test the new
427-M system had inexplicably been transferred into the regular warning display. As all command
centers were linked, they all showed the same thing. The air force insisted that there was
never any real risk, and that all the actions taken were, “Merely precautionary.” Secretary of
Defense Harold Brown cited, “The human element is preventing the risk of any irretrievable actions.”
Brown also said that, “We must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction,
may someday generate another false alert.” A note that proved true, as there were three
more false alerts in 1980, all attributed to a flaw in a 46 cent computer chip. A senior State
Department official at the time warned Secretary of State Cyrus Vance “That false reports of this
kind are not a rare occurrence.” We may have been lucky in the timing and that US-Soviet
relations were relatively calm in 1979, a year which saw the signing of the second of the US
Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, giving more reason to question the validity of the alert.
But they deteriorated quickly, partly because of a diplomatic exchange based on the reports
in the 1979 alert, and even more so as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980. As relations
deteriorated, the risk of miscalculation due to false alarms became even more real.
While flaws were recognized in the 427-M system from the start, it took nearly a decade to
replace the system. And much has happened in the time since, the Soviet Union is gone, as is the
Strategic Air Command which was reorganized out of existence. And Cheyenne Mountain complex is no
longer the headquarters for NORAD, the complex today hosts about 1/10 as many employees as it
did in its height in 1979. The risk today of a nuclear war starting because of a false alarm
is uncertain, but still real. In the end, decades of false alarms in both the United States and the
Soviet Union have never resulted in what Harold Brown called, “Irretrievable actions.” The event
in 1979 was little and inaccurately reported at the time, and the vast majority of the world's
billions of people slept through the night not knowing that anything extraordinary at all had
happened in the early morning of November 9th. Whether this is just a memory of the tensions of
the past, or a warning of the risks of the future, it is history that deserves to be remembered.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please go
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