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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.

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Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.

Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.

1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days.

2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.

There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

For some reason I mixed this with the Cuban missile crisis, I thought it had something to do with it.

My favorite is https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-moon-and-nuclear-wa...

We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

And my understanding is the US military leadership was generally in favor of attacking Cuba not knowing there were already nuclear warheads there.

With proper training, that should be irrelevant.

They probably had second thoughts, but they got confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.

No amount of training is likely to completely remove human factors. It helps, sometimes a lot, but there's always going to be a bit of a difference thinking actual ordinance is currently headed directly at you.

It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty by the implementers of Aegis to recycle contact IDs so eagerly. With 4 digits it should have taken 10,000 subsequent contacts before that number came around again.

It was a lack of imagination. They didn't anticipate that case and probably just selected the contact IDs randomly. A bad RNG and an unlucky day is all it takes.

Sequential numbering would have been much less confusing to operators.

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