Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

As the computer screens at NORAD filled with Soviet missiles, a Threat Assessment Conference was called. Although the pattern of the attack seemed to fit with the Pentagon’s assumptions about Soviet war plans, its timing made little sense. Tensions between the superpowers weren’t particularly high, and nothing in the news seemed to warrant a “bolt from the blue” attack on the United States. Duty officers at NORAD contacted the radar and ground stations whose sensors were relaying information about the launches. None of them had detected signs of any missiles. The NORAD computers seemed to be providing an erroneous — but highly realistic — account of a Soviet surprise attack.

As a precaution, the Klaxons were sounded at SAC bases nationwide. Bomber crews ran to their planes, and missile crews were put on heightened alert. Fighter-interceptors took off to look for signs of a Soviet attack. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post left Andrews Air Force Base — without President Carter on board. And air traffic controllers throughout the country prepared to clear America’s airspace for military flights, warning every commercial airliner that it might soon have to land.

As the minutes passed without the arrival of Soviet warheads, it became clear that the United States wasn’t under attack. The cause of the false alarm was soon discovered. A technician had put the wrong tape into one of NORAD’s computers. The tape was part of a training exercise — a war game that simulated a Soviet attack on the United States. The computer had transmitted realistic details of the war game to SAC headquarters, the Pentagon, and Site R.

The computers at NORAD had been causing problems for more than a decade. Although they were perhaps the most important data-processing machines in the United States — responsible for compiling and assessing information from all its early-warning radars and satellites — the Honeywell 6060 computers were already obsolete when NORAD installed them within Cheyenne Mountain. A 1978 investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that budget cuts and bureaucratic inflexibility during the Nixon administration had forced NORAD to buy the computers — despite protests from the head of NORAD that they lacked sufficient processing power for crucial early-warning tasks. NORAD’s computers were frequently out of commission, the GAO reported, “due to the lack of readily available spare parts.” Many of the parts hadn’t been manufactured by Honeywell for years.

The morale at NORAD, like its aging computers and software, left room for improvement. A couple of months after the false alarm, twenty-three security officers assigned to the Combat Operations Center inside Cheyenne Mountain were stripped of their security clearances. According to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the security force responsible for protecting the nerve center of America’s command-and-control system was using LSD, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamines.

“FALSE ALARM ON ATTACK SENDS FIGHTERS INTO SKY” was one of the headlines, when news of the training tape incident leaked. Pentagon officials denied that the missile warning had been taken seriously. But the technical and human errors at NORAD felt in keeping with the general mood of the country. An accidental nuclear war didn’t sound inconceivable to most people — America seemed to be falling apart. A few months earlier a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had suffered a partial meltdown, largely because a worker at the plant had turned off an emergency cooling system by mistake.

At about two thirty in the morning on June 3, 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national security adviser, was awakened by a phone call from a staff member, General William E. Odom. Soviet submarines have launched 220 missiles at the United States, Odom said. This time a surprise attack wasn’t implausible. The Soviet Union had recently invaded Afghanistan, confirming every brutal stereotype promoted by the Committee on the Present Danger. The United States was leading a boycott of the upcoming Moscow Olympics, and relations between the two superpowers were at their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brzezinski told Odom to call him back with confirmation of the Soviet attack and its intended targets. The United States would have to retaliate immediately; once the details of the attack were clear, Brzezinski would notify the president. Odom called back and said that 2,200 missiles were heading toward the United States — almost every long-range missile in the Soviet arsenal. As Brzezinski prepared to phone the White House, Odom called again. The computers at NORAD said that Soviet missiles had been launched, but the early-warning radars and satellites hadn’t detected any. It was a false alarm. Brzezinski had allowed his wife to sleep through the whole episode, preferring that she not be awake when the warheads struck Washington.

SAC bomber crews had run to their planes and started the engines. Missile crews had been told to open their safes. The airborne command post of the Pacific Command had taken off. And then the duty officer at the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center ended the Threat Assessment Conference, confident that no Soviet missiles had been launched. Once again, NORAD’s computers and its early-warning sensors were saying different things. The problem was clearly in one of the computers, but it would be hard to find. A few days later NORAD computers warned SAC headquarters and the Pentagon for a third time that the United States was being attacked. Klaxons sounded, bomber crews ran to their planes — and another Threat Assessment Conference declared another false alarm.

This time technicians found the problem: a defective computer chip in a communications device. NORAD had dedicated lines that connected the computers inside Cheyenne Mountain to their counterparts at SAC headquarters, the Pentagon, and Site R. Day and night, NORAD sent test messages to ensure that those lines were working. The test message was a warning of a missile attack — with zeros always inserted in the space showing the number of missiles that had been launched. The faulty computer chip had randomly put the number 2 in that space, suggesting that 2 missiles, 220 missiles, or 2,200 missiles had been launched. The defective chip was replaced, at a cost of forty-six cents. And a new test message was written for NORAD’s dedicated lines. It did not mention any missiles.

TOWARD THE END OF the Eisenhower administration, amid the fiery rhetoric of the missile gap, Bob Peurifoy became concerned that the Soviet Union might attack the United States. With help from his wife, Barbara, and a local contractor, Peurifoy built a bomb shelter underneath the garage at the family home in Albuquerque. Other engineers at Sandia added bomb shelters to their houses, too. The laboratory was a prime target for the Soviets, and the series of international crises during the first two years of the Kennedy administration made the decision seem wise. The Peurifoy shelter had food, water, a dosimeter to measure radiation levels, a door that could be sealed shut, a hand-cranked ventilation fan, a gun, and enough room for five people. He later viewed it as a youthful folly. When the family moved to another house in 1967, a few miles from the nuclear weapon storage facility at Site Able, he didn’t bother to build another shelter. Peurifoy couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to protect his family from the thermonuclear warheads likely to hit the neighborhood. And by the mid-1970s, he was preoccupied with a different threat. Although Peurifoy was conservative and anti-Communist, a Republican and a supporter of increased spending on defense, the nuclear weapons in the American arsenal were the ones keeping him up at night.