Joseph Stalin and the Bomb

[Lumpy]

@md-2000

As I recall about that incident, the other point was there was nothing interesting going on geopolitically (not like the Cuban Missile Crisis) so the likelihood the USA has suddenly launched a sneak missile attack was pretty low probability. The guy made a good judgement call.

A mere seven weeks later NATO conducted Able Archer 83 - Wikipedia
a “dress rehearsal” for a nuclear conflict so realistic that the Kremlin worried it might actually be cover for a surprise attack. If the glitch had happened then, who knows?

[Kropotkin]

IIRC, there was an “event” where the US system mistook a flock of geese for an incoming attack, or am I misremembering?

[bryanmaguire]

It happened in the 1950s. This page mentions it
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/chapters/bracken.html

[TokyoBayer]

I believe that the question has already been answered, but in 1953 when Stalin died, MAD wasn’t an issue yet so there wouldn’t be a concern of integrity of the launch command.

[Schnitte]

It also came just a few weeks after the Soviet Air Force had shot down KAL 007, a civilian Boeing 747 that had mistakenly entered Soviet air space.

[Kropotkin]

And adds these: “In 1960, meteor showers and lunar radar reflections, rather than Canadian geese, excited the new Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar, temporarily leading the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to believe that a Soviet missile attack was en route. In 1980, a 46¢ computer chip failed in the computer warning system, producing an image of a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) attack on the US”

[AK84]

@Schnitte

The Soviet officer in charge at the time was Stanislav Petrov who, correctly, assumed that this was an error and refrained from raising an alert to his superiors. The important thing to note here that Petrov’s job was not to launch counterstrikes; he had neither the authority nor the technical means to do so.

Yes that is true.

His job was to report the alert to superiors, who would then have brought it to the attention of top decision-makers in Moscow. The world was very fortunate that Petrov acted the way he did, because we don’t know what would have happened if he had made that report; but it’s still too much to say that he should have launched a strike.

As @LSLGuy pointed out (a decade plus ago ) what exactly Petrov did is not entirely clear and even whether he refused to tell his superior. As has been pointed out, the feed from the early warning satellites went to other places besides his command center.

Once the computer classifies the signal as an indicator of a launch, it generates an alarm that is automatically sent up the chain of command (especially if it is not a single launch). There were at least three assessment and decision-making layers above the command center of the army that operated the satellites - command centers of the early-warning army, the Air Defense Forces (which was a separate service back then), and, finally, the General Staff.