Reply #6: Here's one the other way around [View All]

[mzteris]

Q. "You write about the 1980 US incident where our National Security Advisor got a call that there was a launch from Russia. What happened there? Are the Russians the only one who have had problems with their early warning system?"

A. "President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awakened 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning with the word that 1,000 missiles were headed to the United States across the Pacific. And they thought this was a genuine nuclear attack on the United States. And they began to take bombers off. They began to put alert aircraft in the air, that is, the airborne command posts, and that kind of thing. And while this was going on, Brzezinski was deciding whether to call President Carter and ask him, "Do you want to give the order to counter-launch under this attack?" when he made one more check. And they called back and said of the several warning stations that should have seen this incoming attack, only one had seen it. And therefore they discounted it because there was an error in that system. A computer failure. A training program put in or something, instead of a genuine one. But that's terribly dangerous. I don't think President Carter would have launched. I really don't. But who knows?"

Admiral Stansfield Turner . http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/russia/interviews/turner.html