• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 297 0

from the satellites themselves. Sure enough, no missiles showed up. The strange part was that these fictional missiles weren’t just the random blips typically associated with computer failure, they were perfectly organized, like textbook tactical . . . And that’s when it dawned on them: Some idiot from the previous shift loaded a “simulated attack” training tape into the computers and forgot to set the switch to “test.” The result was a terrifying missile scare at every Minuteman silo in the nation, the United States coming within moments of a nuclear strike, and Jimmy Carter’s sad realization that when shit really goes down, he gets left behind harder than the kid in Home Alone.

3. THE CASE OF THE BROKEN NUCLEAR ANSWERING MACHINE

During the cold war, the most likely source of an American first strike against Russia was a submarine in the waters near Norway, because a single nuke, detonated that far north of Soviet territory would blind the radar to the doomsday barrage launched from the continental United States. So you can forgive the Russian radar station that detected a missile launch from Norway on January 25, 1985, for getting just a smidge nukey. Things got an awful lot nukier once they saw it separate into what appeared to be several warheads, as is standard on Trident missiles. A missile from Norway would only take about ten minutes to hit Russia.

Ten minutes.

In the time it takes most of us to decide what to watch on TV, the Russians had to decide whether or not to end the entire world over a possible glitch. The operators scrambled desperately to verify the information, and it came back as accurate. When they realized they were definitely seeing a real projectile, they sent an emergency signal to President Yeltsin’s “nuclear briefcase,” which is like getting to third base for Armageddon.

The call went out and all forces stood at alert for the counterstrike. With only two minutes left to ground zero, the warheads suddenly dropped into the sea and disappeared.

How come we’re still alive?

Unlike the other instances, this was no computer glitch—it was an actual missile . . . just not a nuclear one; it was a scientific research rocket.

NASA had organized a rocket launch to study the northern lights.

And while it might seem a bit suicidally reckless to launch a rocket from the most dangerous watch point on earth in the direction of a nuclear superpower in the midst of the cold war, it should be noted that NASA did warn everyone of their plans several weeks earlier. But what was Russia supposed to do? Write that shit down? Have you seen Russian writing?

How are we still alive?!

2. THE CASE OF THE NUCLEAR PLAYDATE

On November 2, 1983, a ten-day NATO war games exercise named Able Archer 83 began, and it was quite possibly the closest mankind has ever come to nuclear annihilation. That was also the year pop-metal band Europe raced up the charts with the hit single “The Final Countdown,” thereby proving that the people of 1983 were both ready for, and richly deserving of, complete obliteration.

Tensions between the Soviets and the West were already at an all-time high when the operation got under way. The Russians were so certain that Reagan was planning a first strike that the KGB drew up a checklist of events they expected to precede a nuclear attack by the Americans. And then, one by one, they all started happening: Due to the invasion of Grenada, coded messages between Britain and America increased dramatically, missiles and signals units were deployed to the borders en masse, all the NATO commanders retreated to a single bunker, and a state of DEFCON 1 was announced. Then came something the Russians hadn’t even bothered to put on the list: a complete simulated nuclear missile launch.

Yep. At the height of the cold war, the Western forces played pretend so hard that they even faked a complete missile launch directly at Russia.

We do not deserve life.

How come we’re still alive?

No one knows. All of the KGB’s intelligence indicated a real attack. Many believe that the only reason the Russians