The History Guy remembers the 3 a.m. call of the 1979 NORAD alert at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, during the Cold War. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
A computer error at NORAD headquarters led to alarm and full preparation for a nonexistent large-scale Soviet attack.
NORAD notified national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Soviet Union had launched 250 ballistic missiles with a trajectory for the United States, stating that a decision to retaliate would need to be made by the president within 3 to 7 minutes.
NORAD computers then placed the number of incoming missiles at 2,200. Strategic Air Command was notified, and nuclear bombers prepared for takeoff.
Within six to seven minutes of the initial response, satellite and radar systems were able to confirm that the attack was a false alarm. It was found that a training scenario was inadvertently loaded into an operational computer.
Commenting on the incident, U.S. State Department adviser Marshall Shulman stated that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me."
In the months following the incident there were three more false alarms at NORAD, two of them caused by faulty computer chips.