Nuclear warfare was started due to spilled coffee. Oops.
Actually, one of the almost-launched was due to seagulls in the morning (USSR), and another was due to a replay of a training exercise tape (US). After I heard of the US incident, I always imagined that somebody might toss Black Sabbath into the wrong tape machine at Norad, and civilization would be reset. Hard.
In a happier note, one of the rare foreign policy triumphs of the both incompetent and paranoid (mostly about fellow Westerners and Americans, though) Carter Administration was a doozy, and rhymes with those.
We Yanks (I was still fully Canadian back then) tapped the Soviets’ Far Easter cables from Kamchatka and the Maritimes to Sakhalin and the Komandorskyes (and later other places too) by looking for the “Warning Idiots” signs about where to absolutely never ever, EVER drop anchor you freaking morons – the ones protecting the super top secret Soviet cables from the lowest of low tech threats, their own fishermen and drillers. We literally tapped directly in to some and decoded the rest by induction analysis with submariners operating in their top secret closed military waters.
Nuclear warfare was started due to spilled coffee. Oops.
Actually, one of the almost-launched was due to seagulls in the morning (USSR), and another was due to a replay of a training exercise tape (US). After I heard of the US incident, I always imagined that somebody might toss Black Sabbath into the wrong tape machine at Norad, and civilization would be reset. Hard.
In a happier note, one of the rare foreign policy triumphs of the both incompetent and paranoid (mostly about fellow Westerners and Americans, though) Carter Administration was a doozy, and rhymes with those.
We Yanks (I was still fully Canadian back then) tapped the Soviets’ Far Easter cables from Kamchatka and the Maritimes to Sakhalin and the Komandorskyes (and later other places too) by looking for the “Warning Idiots” signs about where to absolutely never ever, EVER drop anchor you freaking morons – the ones protecting the super top secret Soviet cables from the lowest of low tech threats, their own fishermen and drillers. We literally tapped directly in to some and decoded the rest by induction analysis with submariners operating in their top secret closed military waters.
I deeply love this story.
Dangnabit, that’s the bane of cables being dragged across a keyboard.
Ah, that’s poignant. “I don’t have eyes to cry”