Nukes of Hazard - The New Yorker
On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 A.M. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of…
Hasnain says:
"And so, for six minutes in 1995, the future of the species hung in the balance because a mid-level Russian official left work early, or neglected to find a proper procedure for dealing with a message that someone was sending up a rocket, at an unspecified time, to look at the northern lights. It’s like the forty-six-cent computer chip. There was no redundancy built into the system. If one piece failed, the whole system was imperilled."
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:37:59+0000