We are going to start this episode in the very early morning of October 3rd, 1979,

when Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zabignev, Brzynski, got a phone call from his military

aid around 4 a.m. I asked Josh Keating to tell me the story.

Rijinsky was told that night that 220 missiles had been fired from Soviet submarines off the coast

of Oregon, which meant that he had just a few minutes on his hands to decide whether to call

up President Jimmy Carter and wake him up to tell him that the

U.S. was under nuclear attack. Josh covers foreign policy and national security at Fox. As the story goes,

Brzynski decided not to wake his wife because he figured she'd be better off dying in her

sleep if the attack was real.

Just before Brzynski called to wake up President Carter, his phone rang again.

His aide called back and said it had been a false alarm.

That it was a defective computer chip cost less than a dollar in a communication system

that had set off a false alarm.

Then, about four years later, came another near miss, this time on the Soviet side. This is the famous story of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who his computer system

detected that the US had launched missiles, and he had a few minutes to decide whether to

call up the chain of command to Moscow to inform them that the Soviet Union is under attack,

which under Soviet nuclear doctrine meant they would have been required to retaliate by

launching all of the Soviet nuclear missiles. It turned out that the machine had just

misinterpreted the glint of

sunlight off of clouds as a missile attack. So, you know, it was a case where he decided to wait

a few minutes and confirm, and it turned out that it was the machinery that was at fault.

Once again, full-scale nuclear war was averted, pulled back from the brink by humans.

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