Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

by Eric Schlosser

And on November 24, just before dawn, SAC headquarters in Omaha lost contact with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Thule, Greenland. A SAC controller picked up the phone and called NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs to find out what was wrong. The line was dead. The odds of a communications breakdown simultaneously extending east and west from Omaha seemed low. SAC’s entire alert force was ordered to prepare for takeoff. At air bases worldwide, Klaxons sounded and pilots climbed into hundreds of planes. A few minutes later the order was rescinded. The B-52 circling Thule had made contact with the base. It had not been destroyed by the Soviets. An investigation subsequently found that the failure of a single AT&T switch in Black Forest, Colorado, had shut down all the ballistic missile early warning circuits, voice communications between the SAC and NORAD command posts, and the “hot line” linking SAC’s commander to NORAD headquarters. AT&T had neglected to provide redundant circuits for some of the nation’s most important communications links, despite assurances that it had done so.