Armageddon Almost Not Averted
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/05/27/007.html Thursday, May 27, 2004. Page 10. Armageddon Almost Not Averted By Matt Bivens The mental image we all have of a near-nuclear war scenario goes like this: A threat is detected; military men dutifully begin working their way through a crisp and precise set of protocols; maybe it even gets as far as the authorities ordering missile launch officers to break open those little squares of hard plastic we know from the movies, the ones that hold the launch codes. But the threat is defused, or revealed to have been false -- and then everyone stands down from Armageddon in the same crisp, orderly fashion as they had ramped up for it. It turns out that it's nothing like that. Consider, for example, a fun Cold War-era fact from Bruce Blair, who is president of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information (home of Johnson's Russia List). Blair was a Minuteman nuclear missile launch officer in the 1970s, and reg...