Then, the vice-commander of NORAD had a thought. The dozens of Soviet missiles would impact and that would be that. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (all connected by phone) had minutes to make a decision. The number 5 was maximum, meaning it was 99.9 percent certain that the US was under attack.Īs if on cue, the number flashed 1. If it went up to 3, the threat level was confirmed as “high” and the seniormost members of the military would be notified. It happened as some businessmen were being shown around NORAD and the threat levels were explained to them: if the number 1 flashed in red, unidentified objects were coming towards the US. The first serious false alarm came shortly before the SIOP was ready and just after the first BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) facility in Greenland had come online. October 1960: Moonrise over Norway doesn’t result in nuclear holocaustĪ Greenlander with his dog sleigh looks at the radars of Thule Air Base, 1966 (NF) However, this means that between 19, the impact of an accidental trigger was at its greatest and this is reflected below. He ripped the document apart, eliminating 75 percent of the targets, introduced a genuinely flexible targeting philosophy, and finally tamed it. I came to fully appreciate… we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion. This was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan,” he said, In essence, when the SIOP was actioned, the world would end.Īt last, though, in 1991, the incoming head of Strategic Air Command, General George Lee Butler, took a look at the SIOP he’d inherited and balked. Attempts to introduce escalating steps were tried, but, in practice, these would have had questionable and limited effectiveness. There were abortive attempts to include options such as “Limited Nuclear Options” and “Regional Nuclear Options”, but for year after year no one could tame the SIOP. Importantly, the early versions of the SIOP were inflexible and deterministic.
They would “launch on warning” (the “use them or lose them” philosophy). Existing to specify the nuclear targets and to dictate when, where and by whom each target would be struck, it would be a unified and joint plan, completely integrating all arms of the military and working closely with allies (for example, in the first version, the UK would destroy three airbases, six air defense targets, and 48 cities).ĭue to the staggering damage that could be caused by a first strike, the US would not wait for the bombs to hit before launching their own strike. In late 1960, the US Defense Staff created this - America’s war plan. Much of the potential impact of a near-miss revolves around something called the SIOP: the Single Integrated Operational Plan. (I have skipped over some incidents where I felt precautions being taken were likely to stop war breaking out, but we learned from them, for example: don’t leave training tapes in live equipment without telling the next shift unless you want them to stare in horror at screens telling them hundreds of missiles are coming over the pole.) The SIOPĭeputy commander’s launch key in an American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile silo (National Park Service) I’ve used my standard method of looking at which event had the greatest chance of changing history - in both probability and impact. Once again, as with so many of my articles, I’ve had difficulty keeping the number down to five. When you’re this close to Armageddon, sheer bad luck can take you over the edge. With Trump, Putin, Middle East unrest, tensions in Kashmir, coupled with climate change concerns, we’re as close to the end as we ever have been. Since then, it has moved away (as far as seventeen minutes to midnight in 1991) and back in again. In 1953, we got to two minutes to midnight. By 1949, it was three minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947 and set to seven minutes to midnight. The second is, more prosaically, the actual time. The first statement is from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and refers to how close we are, as a species, to the end of the world.
It is also 8 in the evening British Summer Time. It is two minutes to midnight at the time I’m writing this article. A Martin RB-57D Canberra reconnaissance jet collets atmospheric samples during a nuclear weapons test in the Pacific Ocean, J(Wikimedia Commons)
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