False Alerts of Soviet Strikes That Almost Led to the Extinction of Humanity… Details

23rd December 2024

3 minutes read

False Alerts of Soviet Strikes That Almost Led to the Extinction of Humanity... Details

During the Cold War, false alerts about missile attacks were handled in secrecy, although news about them eventually leaked.

According to documents from the U.S. National Archives, a warning of a massive Soviet missile attack was issued on the morning of November 9, 1979, to the extent that former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t die alone!”

The false alert occurred in the middle of the night during the Carter administration, on June 3, 1980.

The cause of the false alert was the failure of a 46-cent computer chip in a computer at the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, located in Colorado, which belonged to what was then called the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). This failure sent signals showing what appeared to be a massive Soviet nuclear missile attack on U.S. soil.

American military personnel saw 2200 Soviet warheads launching towards the United States on their radar screens. They feared that the preemptive Soviet strike they had been dreading had already occurred.

Alerts regarding a massive Soviet nuclear missile attack were also issued by systems connected to the global command and control network known as WEMICS, which was considered the advanced electronic brain of the U.S. military. It connected distant U.S. strategic defense centers and relied on data from surrounding satellites and radars.

The WEMICS system was so advanced that it had the capability to issue orders autonomously, including preparing for war, raising alert levels, and launching strategic bombers into the air.

U.S. command centers relayed the data about this attack, putting nearly 2000 U.S. ballistic missiles on standby and launching 10 interceptor aircraft into the air.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former advisor to President Jimmy Carter, was the first to receive the report about this imminent nuclear attack warning.

Brzezinski wrote in his memoirs, published in 2011, that he described this terrifying moment by saying: “If this were true, my life and that of my loved ones, as well as Washington and much of America, would end in half an hour. I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t die alone.”

Reports from that time stated that the “Doomsday Plane,” intended for the U.S. president and supreme leadership in case of nuclear war, took off without President Jimmy Carter, as they were unable to find him at that moment.

Six minutes after this alarming alert, Brzezinski was informed in a third call that experts suspected something was wrong with the alert. It turned out that the U.S. early warning systems, which detect the smallest seismic activities typically associated with ballistic missile launches, had not reported anything of the sort.

Further checks were made on the system that had issued the Soviet nuclear attack warning, and it was revealed that the alert was false, caused by a simulation of a Soviet missile launch entered by a lieutenant colonel at the NORAD command center. The system did not distinguish this simulation from a real attack and issued the alert.

In the end, U.S. leaders breathed a sigh of relief, while no official response was issued by the Soviet Union. However, information from the U.S. National Archives revealed that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had sent a secret message to President Jimmy Carter, expressing concerns about the incident and pointing out that such situations “carry great risks.”

This incident was not the only one of its kind. Years earlier, on October 5, 1960, a U.S. long-range detection and observation station in Thule, Greenland, reported a massive Soviet intercontinental missile strike. It later turned out that the alert was also false.

At that time, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was visiting the United States. An investigation into the incident showed that the error was caused by radio signals reflected off the moon’s surface.