Destroyer of Worlds: Why the Danger of Nuclear War Persists — War is Boring — Medium
▻https://medium.com/war-is-boring/46424ba96d4
Chatham House counts 13 events that could have led to the accidental exchange of nuclear weapons. The institute doesn’t claim this list is comprehensive—these are just a few examples of the ones we know about.
The first is Operation Anadyr in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet military authorized four Soviet missile submarine commanders to use nuclear weapons without approval from Moscow.
When a U.S. warship depth-charged one of the submarines—the Soviet submarine B-59—it was only the intervention of a subordinate officer that convinced the captain not to start World War III.
In 1979 and 1980, America’s ballistic missile radars detected two false alerts that nearly triggered a nuclear release. In the first event, the Air Force’s PAVE PAWS radar was “inadvertently fed test scenario data concerning a Soviet nuclear attack.”
The second incident involved a malfunctioned computer chip. The Air Force only confirmed the warning as faulty within a minute of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski alerting Pres. Jimmy Carter that the homeland was minutes from being annihilated by more than 2,000 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads.
There’s many more. (...)