🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <84...@ttidca.TTI.COM> holl...@ttidcb.tti.com (The Polymath) writes:
>... We came within
>20 minutes of a massive nuclear exchange because our system had spotted
>_the rising full moon_.
>
>Scary stuff.

Not quite as scary as one might think; 20 minutes is a long time by those
standards.  Trust in those fairly-new systems was by no means total, the
way I heard it.  Yes, an alert was called -- those people get paid to be
paranoid, even when they are fairly sure it's a false alarm -- but it was
a long way from initiating anything irreversible.  There is more than one
possible level of alert; as I recall, US nuclear forces have never reached
the last couple of levels.  Policy then (and, theoretically, still) is that
retaliation for a possible nuclear attack isn't actually initiated until
positive confirmation of nuclear *explosions* on US soil.  Seeing them
coming isn't enough to do anything more than start some preparations and
hedging of bets.

It's fun to tell ghost stories to the gullible, but claiming that the world
was on the brink of war is an exaggeration.  Things were somewhat more tense
than usual, yes.
-- 
1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972:  human |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry he...@zoo.toronto.edu