Remember the 1983 movie WarGames?
The film is about a computer "game" with the potential to start
thermonuclear war. But strangely this scenario is more truth than
fiction. Because in 1979 programmers at NORAD almost started World War
III when they accidentally ran a computer simulation of a Soviet attack.
In the
early morning hours of November 9, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski, the
national security advisor to President Carter, was awakened by a
horrifying phone call. According to NORAD,
the Soviet Union had just launched 250 missiles headed straight for
American soil. Brzenzinski received another call not long after the
first, and NORAD was reporting that it was now 2,200 missiles. This was
the moment that every American living through the Cold War had feared.
And U.S. officials had no plans to notify the public.
Brzenzinski
didn't even bother waking up his wife. He assumed that he and everyone
he knew would soon be dead, so there was no sense in troubling her. One can only imagine the dismal post-apocalyptic world flashing before his mind's eye as he thought about his next steps.
"I knew
that if it were true, then within about half an hour I, and my loved
ones, and Washington, and the majority of America would cease to exist. I
wanted to be sure that we'd have company," Brzenzinski told a biographer in 2011.
What
Brzenzinski meant was that he wanted to make sure if the attack was real
that the Soviet Union would be little more than a giant hole in the
ground. If we were going down, our Commie adversaries were going down
with us. READ MORE
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