I listened to a fascinating podcast with the best interviewer in the English language, Chicago's WGN's Milt Rosenberg, interviewing a very smart and cogent Ron Rosenbaum with his latest book, _How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III_.
To find out how precarious nuclear strike can theoretically be and how, in fact, there have been near-misses, besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, makes me almost ill.
One story is a training program was mistakenly inserted in the Soviet computers. It appeared as though the USSR were launching 221 ballistic missiles. Leonid Brezhnev got the call in the middle of the night.
Knowing the US President would be in the dark for another four or five minutes if this were the case, Brezhnev didn't even wake his wife sleeping beside him. He thought the end was coming.
But he got a second call from his aide that it was a false alarm.
To find out how precarious nuclear strike can theoretically be and how, in fact, there have been near-misses, besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, makes me almost ill.
One story is a training program was mistakenly inserted in the Soviet computers. It appeared as though the USSR were launching 221 ballistic missiles. Leonid Brezhnev got the call in the middle of the night.
Knowing the US President would be in the dark for another four or five minutes if this were the case, Brezhnev didn't even wake his wife sleeping beside him. He thought the end was coming.
But he got a second call from his aide that it was a false alarm.
We also learned that for the first time a bunch of US missiles went off-line in mysterious fashion for a time at precisely the same time the Israelis' combat malware, the Stuxnet worm, was infecting the Iranian nuclear programme.
There are not enough really smart people with oversight--starting with the occupant in the Oval Office--of our nuclear bombs.
Scary and depressing.
There are not enough really smart people with oversight--starting with the occupant in the Oval Office--of our nuclear bombs.
Scary and depressing.
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