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| In the past quarter century, Russia and the UnitedStates each have come close twice to launching nuclear missiles to counter aperceived attack. Above, Russia's premier ICBM, the TOPOL M, in a testfiring. |
False Alarms on the Nuclear Front
by Geoffrey FordenThe Cuban missile crisis is the best-known example of narrowly avoiding nuclearwar. However, there are at least four other less well-known incidents in whichthe superpowers geared up for nuclear annihilation. Those incidents differedfrom the Cuban missile crisis in a significant way: They occurred when eitherthe U.S. or Soviet or Russian leaders had to respond to false alarms fromnuclear warning systems that malfunctioned or misinterpreted benign events.All four incidents were very brief, probably lasting less than 10 minutes each.Professional military officers managed most of them. Those officers had todecide whether or not to recommend launching a "retaliatory" strike beforepossibly losing their own nuclear first strikes. In three of the fourincidents, the decision not to respond to the alarm was made when space-basedearly-warning sensors failed to show signs of massive nuclear attacks. Thefourth incident was caused by an inadequate early-warning satellite system thatwas fooled into thinking that reflected sunlight was the flames from a handfulof ICBMs. As the following brief history of those four incidents makes clear, space-basedearly-warning systems played a major role in avoiding nuclear war. During the1980s, a few specialized articles in the media hinted at the presence of thosesystems. However, it was only during the Gulf War that the American publictruly became aware of U.S. capability to detect missile launches usingspace-based assets. During that crisis, U.S. Defense Support Program (DSP)satellites, first orbited in 1970, detected the launch of every Iraqi Scudmissile. The satellites made the detections from their orbits by "seeing" theinfrared light that the missiles' motors gave off during powered flight. Thewarning of launches was transmitted to Patriot air defense missile batteries inIsrael and Saudi Arabia to support attempts to shoot down the incomingwarheads. The association with the fighting of conventional war has obscuredthe more important strategic role those systems have played: reassuring leadersof the United States and Russia that they were not under nuclear attack. Areview of the four nuclear crises will better highlight that role. | Early on the morning of November 9, 1979, control centers forAmerican Minuteman missiles, such as the one above, went on high alert for aharrowing several minutes. |
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The training tape incidentShortly before 9 a.m. on November 9, 1979, the computers at North American AerospaceDefense Command's Cheyenne Mountain site, the Pentagon's National MilitaryCommand Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center in FortRitchie, Maryland, all showed what the United States feared most—a massiveSoviet nuclear strike aimed at destroying the U.S. command system and nuclearforces. A threat assessment conference, involving senior officers at all threecommand posts, was convened immediately. Launch control centers for Minutemanmissiles, buried deep below the prairie grass in the American West, receivedpreliminary warning that the United States was under a massive nuclear attack.The alert did not stop with the U.S. ICBM force. The entire continental airdefense interceptor force was put on alert, and at least 10 fighters took off.Furthermore, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, the president's"doomsday plane," was also launched, but without the president on board. It waslater determined that a realistic training tape had been inadvertently insertedinto the computer running the nation's early-warning programs.
| In the "training tape" incident, Defense Support Program early-warningsatellites saved the day. Above, a $256 million DSP satellite goes aloft inAugust 2001. |
However, within minutes of the original alert, the officers had reviewed theraw data from the DSP satellites and checked with the early-warning radarsringing the country. The radars were capable of spotting missiles launched fromsubmarines close to the U.S. shores and ICBM warheads that had traveled farenough along their trajectories to rise above the curvature of the Earth. TheDSP satellites were capable of detecting the launches of Soviet missiles almostanywhere on the Earth's surface. Neither system showed any signs that thecountry was under attack, so the alert was canceled.The computer chip incident On June 3, 1980, less than a year after the incident involving the training tape,U.S. command posts received another warning that the Soviet Union had launcheda nuclear strike. As in the earlier episode, launch crews for Minutemanmissiles were given preliminary launch warnings, and bomber crews manned theiraircraft. This time, however, the displays did not present a recognizable oreven a consistent attack pattern as they had during the training tape episode.Instead, the displays showed a seemingly random number of attacking missiles.The displays would show that two missiles had been launched, then zeromissiles, and then 200 missiles. Furthermore, the numbers of attacking missilesdisplayed in the different command posts did not always agree.Although many officers did not take this event as seriously as the incident ofthe previous November, the threat assessment conference still convened toevaluate the possibility that the attack was real. Again the committee reviewedthe raw data from the early-warning systems and found that no missiles had beenlaunched. Later investigations showed that a single computer chip failure hadcaused random numbers of attacking missiles to be displayed. The autumn equinox incident On September 26, 1983, the newly inaugurated Soviet early-warning satellite systemcaused a nuclear false alarm. Like the United States, the Soviet Union realizedthe importance of monitoring the actual launch of ICBMs. However, the Sovietschose a different method of spotting missile launches. Instead of looking downon the entire Earth's surface the way U.S. DSP satellites do, Soviet satelliteslooked at the edge of the Earth—thus reducing the chance that naturallyoccurring phenomena would look like missile launches. Missiles, when they hadrisen five or ten miles, would appear silhouetted against the black backgroundof space. Furthermore, when the edge of the Earth is viewed, light reflectedfrom clouds or snow banks has to pass through a considerable amount of theatmosphere. That view reduces the chances that clouds and snow may cause falsealarms.| A Russian Oko early-warning satellite's hypothesized view ofU.S. missile fields at the time of the so-called "autumn equinox" incident. |
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A satellite has to be in a unique position to view a recently launched missilesilhouetted against the black of space. To get that view, the Soviet Unionpicked a special type of orbit that it had used for its communicationssatellites. Those orbits, known as Molnyia orbits, come very close to the Earthin the Southern Hemisphere but extend nearly a tenth of the distance to themoon as the satellite passes over the Northern Hemisphere. From that positionhigh above northern Europe, the Soviet Union's Oko ("Eye") early-warningsatellites spend a large fraction of their time viewing the continental U.S.missile fields at just the right glancing angle. However, shortly aftermidnight Moscow time on September 26, 1983, the sun, the satellite, and U.S.missile fields all lined up in such a way as to maximize the sunlight reflectedfrom high-altitude clouds.Whether that effect was a totally unexpected phenomenon is hard to know. Thatmay have been the first time this rare alignment had occurred since the systembecame operational the previous year. Press interviews with Lt. Col. StanislavPetrov, the officer in charge of Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker from which theSoviet Union monitored its early-warning satellites, indicated that the newsystem reported the launch of several missiles from the U.S. continentalmissile fields. Petrov had been told repeatedly that the United States wouldlaunch a massive nuclear strike designed to overwhelm Soviet forces in a singlestrike. Why did that false alarm fail to trigger a nuclear war? Perhaps the Russiancommand did not want to start a war on the basis of data from a new and uniquesystem. On the other hand, if the sun glint had caused the system to reporthundreds of missile launches, then the Soviet Union might have mistakenlylaunched its missiles. Petrov said that he refused to pass the alert to hissuperiors because "when people start a war, they don't start it with only fivemissiles. You can do little damage with just five missiles." The Norwegian rocket incident Early on the morning of January 25, 1995, Norwegian scientists and their Americancolleagues launched the largest sounding rocket ever from Andoya Island off thecoast of Norway. [Sounding rockets collect data on atmospheric conditions fromvarious altitudes.] Designed to study the northern lights, the rocket followeda trajectory to nearly 930 miles altitude but away from the Russian Federation.To Russian radar technicians, the flight appeared similar to one that a U.S.Trident missile would take to blind Russian radars by detonating a nuclearwarhead high in the atmosphere.
| The trajectory of the Black Brant XII sounding rocket, whichtriggered the "Norwegian rocket" incident. |
That scientific rocket caused a dangerous moment in the nuclear age. Russia waspoised, for a few moments at least, to launch a full-scale nuclear attack onthe United States. In fact, President Boris Yeltsin stated the next day that hehad activated his "nuclear football"—a device that allows the Russianpresident to communicate with his top military advisers and review thesituation online—for the first time.However, we can be fairly confident that Yeltsin's football showed that Russiawas not under attack and that the Russian early-warning system was functioningperfectly. In addition to the string of radars surrounding the border of theformer Soviet Union, Russia had inherited a complete fleet of early-warningsatellites that, even by 1995, still maintained continuous 24-hour coverage ofthe U.S. continental missile fields. In the early 1990s Russia had stillmanaged to launch replacement satellites for its early-warning system as theprevious ones died out—thereby retaining continuous coverage. Because ofthose satellites, Yeltsin's display must have shown that no massive attack waslurking just below the horizon. | See a QuickTime animation of the orbit of the Russian satellite Cosmos 1382, which the author believes issued the false alarm during the "autumn equinox" incident. View the QuickTime animation (12MB) Get QuickTime plugin |
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Towards reliable early warningThe danger posed by those incidents was not the unauthorized or accidentallaunch of a handful of nuclear-tipped missiles but the possibility that eithercountry might misinterpret a benign event—a computer training tapemistakenly inserted into an operational computer or sunlight glinting offclouds during a rare lineup of the sun, Earth, and satellite—and decide tolaunch a full-scale nuclear attack.Each incident caused officials to take steps to solve a specific problem. Afterthe training tape incident, the U.S. Department of Defense constructed aseparate facility to train operators so that a training tape could not again beinserted into the computer running the nation's early-warning system.Apparently, the Soviet Union launched a new fleet of early-warning satellitesinto geostationary orbit simply to provide a second angle from which to view U.S.missile fields. That expensive and redundant system ensured that at least onesatellite could search for missile launches free from sun glint. After three of the four incidents, the U.S. government maintained that stepswere taken that would prevent any future false alarms. However, it had to waitonly seven months after the first incident (the computer tape incident) to seethat complex organizations, relying on even more complex machinery, can findnew and unexpected ways to fail. In fact, a comprehensive study of nuclearaccidents has shown convincing historical evidence that, despite measures takento prevent them, such accidents are inevitable.
| Despitecareful measures to insure nuclear accidents never happen, history reveals thatsuch mishaps are inevitable. Are we prepared for the next one? |
The most recent example of solving the "last problem" was the Clintonadministration's initiative to share early-warning data with Russia. Thejointly manned center has been presented by the American side as a solution tothe decline of Russia's early-warning facilities. Russians familiar with thenegotiations, however, maintain that the center has no military significance.That view is underscored by the choice of the site for the center: an oldschoolhouse nearly an hour away from downtown Moscow. In fact, U.S. Departmentof Defense officials familiar with the Joint Data Exchange Center (JDEC) admitthat, even if the center had been active during the Norwegian rocket incident,its only effect would have been to facilitate the launch notification issuedbefore the NASA launch. Any assistance the United States provides must increase Russia's confidence inthe validity of its own early-warning systems. The JDEC fails that test. Russiawould never believe that the United States would pass along launch indicationsif a U.S. nuclear attack had been launched. |
| Dr. Geoffrey Forden is a senior research fellow with the Security StudiesProgram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article was adaptedwith permission from a longer article Forden wrote entitled "Reducing a CommonDanger: Improving Russia's Early-Warning System." Published by the CatoInstitute, a Washington D.C.-based public policy research foundation, thearticle originally appeared on May 3, 2001 as Cato Policy Analysis No. 399. Tosee the full piece, go to www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa399.pdf. |
Photos: (1) WGBH/NOVA; (2-3) Corbis Images; Illustrations and QuickTime animation: Geoffrey Forden, MIT. | Printer-Friendly Format | | | Feedback |
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