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A long read & sobering article. One hopes sufficient checks exist in an Indo Pak context.
The Day the World Didn't End - Lapsed Historian
The morning of the 26th September 1983 had started quietly at Serpukhov-15, a Soviet military townlet about 70km south of Moscow. Despite its small size, the base was important, for it was home to the primary control centre for “Oko,” a satellite-based missile launch detection system.
If the USSR was subject to nuclear assault then the men and women monitoring Oko would be the first to know. If the Soviets were to have any hope of retaliating then a swift, early warning from them was critical.
It was a heavy burden to bear, one made worse by the fact that tensions between the superpowers that summer were higher than they had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis several decades before. Indeed at the very highest levels the Soviets had become convinced that a pre-emptive nuclear strike by America was not just likely, but practically inevitable.
And then suddenly that September morning Oko erupted into life. Sirens blared and red lights blazed.
Missile launch detected.
Instantly the men and women of Serpukhov-15 sprang into action. Calculations were made and systems checked for failure, all of them came back clear. More and more data was coming in now and all of it seemed to paint a terrible picture. A single, deadly, Minuteman III ICBM had been launched from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, targeted on the Soviet Union.
The staff of the control centre looked to the man who sat at their centre – forty-four year old Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
“Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me.” He later recounted. “What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems — on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct.”
The rules were clear. As the man in charge it was Petrov’s responsibility to report the missile launch. The data was irrefutable.
The trouble, Petrov realised as he began to automatically run through the notification procedure, was that deep down, for reasons he couldn’t yet explain, this just didn’t feel right.
As the West slept on, oblivious to the mounting danger, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov paused.
”Call me back”
Although it may not have felt like it to those living through it, throughout the bulk of the Cold War the risk of an actual nuclear launch was relatively low. In part, this was because both sides of the conflict were critically aware that the risk of an accidental launch – and the likely terrible chain of events that would precipitate – was something that needed to be carefully managed. This meant careful consideration of how to approach control of both nuclear weapons themselves and the decision-making process behind their use.
Finding a balance between speed and effectiveness, however, was a constant balancing act. In our look at the British Space Programme we described, briefly, one of the bizarre situations this lead to in the UK, whereby nuclear missiles on Vulcan bombers stationed in Scotland were allowed to have either fuel or a warhead, but never both.
Both the USA and the USSR faced similar problems, but on a grander scale, and mistakes in both the handling of weapons and – perhaps more critically – the detection of their use by the other side were not unheard of.
On the night of the 9th November 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, was awakened by the sound of the phone he kept next to his bed.
Brzezinski answered it. On the other end of the line was Lieutenant Colonel William Odom, his military assistant. Odom calmly informed Brzezinski that NORAD’s early warning systems had detected the launch of 250 missiles from the Soviet Union. In line with his responsibilities, Odom told him, Brzezinski should inform the President.
Adrenaline now flowing through his veins, Brzezinski paused to think. Could it possibly be true? There’d certainly been no sign of any impending attack from the intelligence services. Pausing to think, he remembered that the time required to initiate a retaliatory launch on the orders of the President was three to seven minutes.
He ordered Odom to get the B-52s of Strategic Air Command in the air, but to do nothing else.
“Confirm it.” He told Odom. “And call me back.”
Brzezinski quietly got out of bed and headed to his office. Looking over at his wife, he decided to leave her sleeping. If Odom was correct, he reasoned, then in half an hour they were both as good as dead anyway. Let her sleep.
The news didn’t get any better when Odom called again a minute later. NORAD, he explained, was now reporting 2,200 missiles in the air. It was an all-out attack.
Resigned to destruction, Brzezinski put down the phone. He paused for a minute to gather his thoughts, and then prepared to ring the President.
As he was about to do so the phone suddenly rang one final time. It was Odom yet again.
None of the other warning systems had picked up a launch, Odom told him. There was some kind of a problem at NORAD. Everyone was standing down. The whole thing was a false alarm.
It would later emerge that a faulty chip in NORAD’s computer systems had resulted in test data simulating an attack accidentally been being routed to its live monitoring displays. Unaware of the issue, the controllers had thought a real nuclear assault was underway before the mistake had been caught.
More launches
Whether Petrov was aware of NORAD’s own close call (which had eventually leaked to the press) or not is unknown. He was critically aware though that every moment he delayed in issuing a Launch Warning increased the risk not just to his country, but to his own career. The pressure on him to pick up the phone and alert his superiors was enormous.
It just didn’t feel right though. Oko was still relatively new and Petrov had seen more than a few bugs emerge during its installation. Who was to say there weren’t more? Whilst it was only one missile, there was just enough leeway in his own orders to allow him to hold off a little longer without risking punishment.
He demanded his staff check everything again, but no sooner had he begun issuing orders when more alarms started blaring.
More launches. Five now in total.
This was serious. Serious enough to trigger automatic alerts to those higher up the chain of command that something was happening.
Petrov was out of time. It was no longer a case of waiting to call his superiors, they were about to call him. And when they did, whatever his own doubts, according to the letter of his orders, he had to issue an official Launch Warning.
As if on cue, the phone on his desk rang.
A gap in the network
Under normal circumstances (or at least what passed for normal in the Cold War) Petrov issuing a warning wouldn’t necessarily have been a disaster. Just as aware of the risks of a false launch detection as the Americans, the Soviets had originally intended to have a system of checks and balances that would produce an experience for decision-makers similar to that of Brzezinski in 1979.
To achieve this, in the early 1970s the Soviet Union had embarked on an ambitious plan to update and improve its detection systems for nuclear attack.
Originally, all Soviet early warning had been radar based, with a focus on Europe and the known likely approaches from the US. Now the Soviets envisioned a three stage warning system, which would allow long, medium and short range detection, and would be better set up to deal with the ICBM threat.
Short range detection would happen via the existing radar system, upgraded and expanded. The satellite-based Oko system would provide long range detection by picking up ICBM launches thermally from space. In between the two would sit a new network of over-horizon (OH) radar stations able to overcome the curvature of the Earth and fill the gap between them.
By 1983, the existing radar network had been upgraded and Oko had finally been brought online. Critically though, the OH radar network had not been built.
This meant that far from having a flexible, nuanced system, the Soviets only really had two possible responses when Oko claimed a launch had taken place. They could either wait until the apparently inbound missiles were close enough to be picked up by the short range radar stations, by which point they would be mere minutes away from their targets, or fire based on Oko’s long range warning alone.
The problem was that in September 1983, unbeknownst to the West, the Soviet leadership felt so threatened that it was leaning heavily towards the latter approach.
A nation in decline
Understanding why this situation existed (and also how the West missed it) means going back to the beginning of the decade. The 1980 US Presidential election took place against a backdrop of national uncertainty. Facing economic troubles at home and still shaken by the Vietnam War and Iran hostage crisis abroad, US voters responded well to Ronald Reagan’s campaign rhetoric which focused on low taxes and small government at home, and a more robust approach to enemies such as the Soviet Union abroad.
Reagan’s anti-Soviet campaigning did not go un-noticed by the Kremlin, who grew increasingly concerned as the election drew near. Reagan seemed to be threatening to usher in a new period of antagonism and anti-Sovietism and this was something the Soviet Union could ill afford. For though the USSR still presented itself as a force to be reckoned with to the outside world, behind the scenes its leadership were fully aware that they were slipping further and further behind the West – militarily, economically and technologically.
This decline had been obvious to those in positions of power for a number of years. In time, Gorbachev would come to refer to it as the “Era of Stagnation,” which would only end with his own ascension to the Soviet Presidency in 1985.
The effects of this stagnation were felt across all areas of the economy and society, not least by the Soviet military. Since 1977, Soviet investment in its nuclear missile programmes had effectively remained static, if not declined, and the increasing Soviet commitment to detente had as much been a quiet acceptance of the fact that it could no longer compete with the US directly as anything else. Meanwhile, a disastrous attempt to reassert order in Afghanistan through conventional warfare not only demonstrated the failing power of the Soviet army, but also provoked international outrage.
By 1981 the Soviet Union was a world power in serious decline, torn between the need to present a strong image both abroad and at home, and a need to reform and cut back spending if it was to survive.
Poking a wounded bear
Into this environment the Reagan administration exploded like a hand grenade. If the Soviets had hoped they would moderate their campaign stance on election they were soon disappointed.
Under Reagan, spending on defence increased to record levels for peacetime, whilst the new President’s own rhetoric continued to harden. Meanwhile, an explicit policy of undermining the Soviet Union through covert political-psychological acts was also pursued.
Flights aimed at spooking the USSR and probing its radar, something that had fallen away in the last decade began again. From 1981 onwards the US Navy also began exercising in areas explicitly aimed at reminding the Soviets that they did not control the ocean.
Publicly the Soviet Union reacted to these provocations with alarm, threats and manoeuvres of their own. To the White House, this was seen largely as bluster to which both they and the Pentagon were happy to respond. Both sides, they believed, were simply playing the same game that they had for decades.
What they failed to realise, however, was that behind the scenes the gerontocracy in charge of the stagnating USSR were no longer playing the same game. Increasingly aware of the growing gap between US military power and their own and feeling increasingly surrounded and probed for weaknesses, the Soviet leadership was starting to get genuinely scared.
The Day the World Didn't End - Lapsed Historian
The morning of the 26th September 1983 had started quietly at Serpukhov-15, a Soviet military townlet about 70km south of Moscow. Despite its small size, the base was important, for it was home to the primary control centre for “Oko,” a satellite-based missile launch detection system.
If the USSR was subject to nuclear assault then the men and women monitoring Oko would be the first to know. If the Soviets were to have any hope of retaliating then a swift, early warning from them was critical.
It was a heavy burden to bear, one made worse by the fact that tensions between the superpowers that summer were higher than they had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis several decades before. Indeed at the very highest levels the Soviets had become convinced that a pre-emptive nuclear strike by America was not just likely, but practically inevitable.
And then suddenly that September morning Oko erupted into life. Sirens blared and red lights blazed.
Missile launch detected.
Instantly the men and women of Serpukhov-15 sprang into action. Calculations were made and systems checked for failure, all of them came back clear. More and more data was coming in now and all of it seemed to paint a terrible picture. A single, deadly, Minuteman III ICBM had been launched from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, targeted on the Soviet Union.
The staff of the control centre looked to the man who sat at their centre – forty-four year old Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
“Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me.” He later recounted. “What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems — on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct.”
The rules were clear. As the man in charge it was Petrov’s responsibility to report the missile launch. The data was irrefutable.
The trouble, Petrov realised as he began to automatically run through the notification procedure, was that deep down, for reasons he couldn’t yet explain, this just didn’t feel right.
As the West slept on, oblivious to the mounting danger, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov paused.
”Call me back”
Although it may not have felt like it to those living through it, throughout the bulk of the Cold War the risk of an actual nuclear launch was relatively low. In part, this was because both sides of the conflict were critically aware that the risk of an accidental launch – and the likely terrible chain of events that would precipitate – was something that needed to be carefully managed. This meant careful consideration of how to approach control of both nuclear weapons themselves and the decision-making process behind their use.
Finding a balance between speed and effectiveness, however, was a constant balancing act. In our look at the British Space Programme we described, briefly, one of the bizarre situations this lead to in the UK, whereby nuclear missiles on Vulcan bombers stationed in Scotland were allowed to have either fuel or a warhead, but never both.
Both the USA and the USSR faced similar problems, but on a grander scale, and mistakes in both the handling of weapons and – perhaps more critically – the detection of their use by the other side were not unheard of.
On the night of the 9th November 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, was awakened by the sound of the phone he kept next to his bed.
Brzezinski answered it. On the other end of the line was Lieutenant Colonel William Odom, his military assistant. Odom calmly informed Brzezinski that NORAD’s early warning systems had detected the launch of 250 missiles from the Soviet Union. In line with his responsibilities, Odom told him, Brzezinski should inform the President.
Adrenaline now flowing through his veins, Brzezinski paused to think. Could it possibly be true? There’d certainly been no sign of any impending attack from the intelligence services. Pausing to think, he remembered that the time required to initiate a retaliatory launch on the orders of the President was three to seven minutes.
He ordered Odom to get the B-52s of Strategic Air Command in the air, but to do nothing else.
“Confirm it.” He told Odom. “And call me back.”
Brzezinski quietly got out of bed and headed to his office. Looking over at his wife, he decided to leave her sleeping. If Odom was correct, he reasoned, then in half an hour they were both as good as dead anyway. Let her sleep.
The news didn’t get any better when Odom called again a minute later. NORAD, he explained, was now reporting 2,200 missiles in the air. It was an all-out attack.
Resigned to destruction, Brzezinski put down the phone. He paused for a minute to gather his thoughts, and then prepared to ring the President.
As he was about to do so the phone suddenly rang one final time. It was Odom yet again.
None of the other warning systems had picked up a launch, Odom told him. There was some kind of a problem at NORAD. Everyone was standing down. The whole thing was a false alarm.
It would later emerge that a faulty chip in NORAD’s computer systems had resulted in test data simulating an attack accidentally been being routed to its live monitoring displays. Unaware of the issue, the controllers had thought a real nuclear assault was underway before the mistake had been caught.
More launches
Whether Petrov was aware of NORAD’s own close call (which had eventually leaked to the press) or not is unknown. He was critically aware though that every moment he delayed in issuing a Launch Warning increased the risk not just to his country, but to his own career. The pressure on him to pick up the phone and alert his superiors was enormous.
It just didn’t feel right though. Oko was still relatively new and Petrov had seen more than a few bugs emerge during its installation. Who was to say there weren’t more? Whilst it was only one missile, there was just enough leeway in his own orders to allow him to hold off a little longer without risking punishment.
He demanded his staff check everything again, but no sooner had he begun issuing orders when more alarms started blaring.
More launches. Five now in total.
This was serious. Serious enough to trigger automatic alerts to those higher up the chain of command that something was happening.
Petrov was out of time. It was no longer a case of waiting to call his superiors, they were about to call him. And when they did, whatever his own doubts, according to the letter of his orders, he had to issue an official Launch Warning.
As if on cue, the phone on his desk rang.
A gap in the network
Under normal circumstances (or at least what passed for normal in the Cold War) Petrov issuing a warning wouldn’t necessarily have been a disaster. Just as aware of the risks of a false launch detection as the Americans, the Soviets had originally intended to have a system of checks and balances that would produce an experience for decision-makers similar to that of Brzezinski in 1979.
To achieve this, in the early 1970s the Soviet Union had embarked on an ambitious plan to update and improve its detection systems for nuclear attack.
Originally, all Soviet early warning had been radar based, with a focus on Europe and the known likely approaches from the US. Now the Soviets envisioned a three stage warning system, which would allow long, medium and short range detection, and would be better set up to deal with the ICBM threat.
Short range detection would happen via the existing radar system, upgraded and expanded. The satellite-based Oko system would provide long range detection by picking up ICBM launches thermally from space. In between the two would sit a new network of over-horizon (OH) radar stations able to overcome the curvature of the Earth and fill the gap between them.
By 1983, the existing radar network had been upgraded and Oko had finally been brought online. Critically though, the OH radar network had not been built.
This meant that far from having a flexible, nuanced system, the Soviets only really had two possible responses when Oko claimed a launch had taken place. They could either wait until the apparently inbound missiles were close enough to be picked up by the short range radar stations, by which point they would be mere minutes away from their targets, or fire based on Oko’s long range warning alone.
The problem was that in September 1983, unbeknownst to the West, the Soviet leadership felt so threatened that it was leaning heavily towards the latter approach.
A nation in decline
Understanding why this situation existed (and also how the West missed it) means going back to the beginning of the decade. The 1980 US Presidential election took place against a backdrop of national uncertainty. Facing economic troubles at home and still shaken by the Vietnam War and Iran hostage crisis abroad, US voters responded well to Ronald Reagan’s campaign rhetoric which focused on low taxes and small government at home, and a more robust approach to enemies such as the Soviet Union abroad.
Reagan’s anti-Soviet campaigning did not go un-noticed by the Kremlin, who grew increasingly concerned as the election drew near. Reagan seemed to be threatening to usher in a new period of antagonism and anti-Sovietism and this was something the Soviet Union could ill afford. For though the USSR still presented itself as a force to be reckoned with to the outside world, behind the scenes its leadership were fully aware that they were slipping further and further behind the West – militarily, economically and technologically.
This decline had been obvious to those in positions of power for a number of years. In time, Gorbachev would come to refer to it as the “Era of Stagnation,” which would only end with his own ascension to the Soviet Presidency in 1985.
The effects of this stagnation were felt across all areas of the economy and society, not least by the Soviet military. Since 1977, Soviet investment in its nuclear missile programmes had effectively remained static, if not declined, and the increasing Soviet commitment to detente had as much been a quiet acceptance of the fact that it could no longer compete with the US directly as anything else. Meanwhile, a disastrous attempt to reassert order in Afghanistan through conventional warfare not only demonstrated the failing power of the Soviet army, but also provoked international outrage.
By 1981 the Soviet Union was a world power in serious decline, torn between the need to present a strong image both abroad and at home, and a need to reform and cut back spending if it was to survive.
Poking a wounded bear
Into this environment the Reagan administration exploded like a hand grenade. If the Soviets had hoped they would moderate their campaign stance on election they were soon disappointed.
Under Reagan, spending on defence increased to record levels for peacetime, whilst the new President’s own rhetoric continued to harden. Meanwhile, an explicit policy of undermining the Soviet Union through covert political-psychological acts was also pursued.
Flights aimed at spooking the USSR and probing its radar, something that had fallen away in the last decade began again. From 1981 onwards the US Navy also began exercising in areas explicitly aimed at reminding the Soviets that they did not control the ocean.
Publicly the Soviet Union reacted to these provocations with alarm, threats and manoeuvres of their own. To the White House, this was seen largely as bluster to which both they and the Pentagon were happy to respond. Both sides, they believed, were simply playing the same game that they had for decades.
What they failed to realise, however, was that behind the scenes the gerontocracy in charge of the stagnating USSR were no longer playing the same game. Increasingly aware of the growing gap between US military power and their own and feeling increasingly surrounded and probed for weaknesses, the Soviet leadership was starting to get genuinely scared.
