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.
