““In what commanders and technicians realized in hindsight was a bad decision, the test messages were identical to the real alert messages that’d be used in an attack, but simply used zeroes to indicate the number of missiles in the air. The real totals would be filled in during an attack. The faulty computer chip began inserting the numeral 2 in place of zeroes—hence the quickly escalating alert from 2 missiles to 220 to 2,200 Soviet ICBMs. It had been a disaster just waiting to happen. The government’s after-action report reported dryly, “Now, that message is in a different format which just indicates the status of the communications system rather than the any indication of numbers of missiles.” The Pentagon’s classified talking points tried to put lipstick on the pig, celebrating that “The human safeguards which are a central part of our system worked as designed.” •””
