"Compared to this attack, Pearl Harbor was like a Sunday picnic."
November 9, 1979.
On a cold winter morning in Colorado, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) alarms began to sound.
As the Cold War began to take a turn for the worse, the analysts instinctively felt a pang of guilt when they witnessed the 250 Soviet-made missiles that had triggered the alarm heading towards the United States.
Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski (right)
At 3 a.m., less than minutes after the alarm was issued, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, was awakened by a call from NORAD informing him that a nuclear attack was imminent. Every second was more precious than gold. He was told he only had three minutes to inform President Jimmy Carter of the situation and ask for his decision.
However, Brzezinski handled the situation cautiously, not reporting to the president immediately. He told the military aide who called him to "check the situation first and then call back." His wife was sleeping beside him, but he didn't wake her, thinking, "They'll all be dead in 30 minutes anyway."
B-52 of the Strategic Air Command
Soon after, a phone call came in informing him that the number of missiles had increased to 2,200, and he thought it was utter annihilation. Brzezinski believed America should retaliate and requested confirmation of preparations for retaliation. Ten Strategic Air Force aircraft then prepared to take to the skies towards the Iron Curtain to carry out American-style retaliation.
As time ticked by, and with less than a minute to spare before the crucial phone call to the president that would transform the war from a cold war into a scorching one, Brzezinski received his third call.
Neither radar nor satellites showed any signs of an approaching missile, and other warning systems had detected nothing. This was a false alarm, caused by someone accidentally loading a training simulation into NORAD headquarters' operations computer.
In retrospect, those bright spots on the radar meant that Earth was just one minute away from World War III!
The opening quote, spoken years later by a congressional investigator about the events, illustrates how the world nearly conflated simulation with reality.