‘I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut’ (1999)

According to the article, "the reports of a missile salvo were coming so quickly that an alert had already gone to general staff headquarters automatically".

It probably wasn't really a bug, but untested behaviour or designers didn't think there could be such strong reflections from clouds. I suppose there wasn't too much real data to test detection algorithms against.

It's mildly depressing and comforting at the same time to realize that none of the code I've written or am writing will even remotely have anything close to 'catastrophic consequences'.

At worst, the number of visitors will drop to 0 for a short while, or clients/internal users won't be able to do their job for said short while. This will quite possibly impact the bottom line of company that relies on that particular site/app/system, but any effect will be lost in the noise (and probably even underestimated, because that's how this happened in the first place!).

While it's sort of nice that there are real-world stakes to the worst-case scenario, it's also both comforting and depressing to contemplate how relatively meaningless these stakes really are, personally.

We are really lucky to be alive. Then again, if an event did trigger WW3, most of us wouldn't be around to wonder what happened. It's sort of a variation on the Anthropic Principle.

Sure you do, every space launch. Smaller ones happen all the time, not just the big famous missions. One launch from Cape Canaveral headed east, not over Moscow, is just another space shuttle mission or a probe headed toward Pluto or whatever. Two launches over the pacific is maybe an ASAT test. On thousand launches is WW3. Five launches... doesn't even make sense, maybe two legit ASAT tests along with three false alarms or two really poorly timed tests for unrelated launcher programs? Or most likely a terrible computer error?

I like the idea of cautiously launching nuclear weapons just in case.

You have your own missiles (with dummy warheads) to check against. This is how it is usually done.

Also if you want to do a sneak attack you don't start it with the weapon your opponent can most easily detect.

So, the control center hasn't been taken out by a cruise missile and the submarine pens are untouched and the bomber airfields check in as OK... it just doesn't make sense as a sneak attack vector. Maybe every sub launched cruise missile in the fleet failed to work; unlikely.

Something not declassified yet, but probably would clear up a lot of confusion, is if the detector code was fooled by sunlight on clouds or whatever, the trajectory solver likely came up with bizarre results like the ICBM launch site was the center of Lake Michigan or downtown Chicago or the trajectory of the other missile has a best fit predicted impact point of Ohio or Mexico City.

They have plenty of practice analyzing the huge horizontal velocity vector of normal spacecraft launches. A strange sunlight reflection would tend to have zero horizontal velocity; the opfor seems to be bombing its own missile sites by tossing the ICBM exactly straight up and down? That seems a little odd unless someone's trying to set off a false flag leading to a real attack.

I would think it would be good defensive coding strategy to have different teams write and deploy the detector code vs the trajectory analysis code, such that if one messes up it really doesn't matter.

Yeah, it was in this article too:

> Petrov's decision was based partly on a guess, he recalled. He had been told many times that a nuclear attack would be massive – an onslaught designed to overwhelm Soviet defenses at a single stroke. But the monitors showed only five missiles. "When people start a war, they don't start it with only five missiles," he remembered thinking at the time. "You can do little damage with just five missiles."

He probably was aware of SIOP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operationa...