President Carter was sound asleep. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski got a call from a General Odom, informing him that 2,000 Soviet nuclear warheads were on their way to the United States. Knowing that Carter had a four- to six-minute window of time to make a decision regarding counterattack, he waited tensely for Odom to call back with more information. He didn't even wake his wife, thinking that everyone would be dead in 30 minutes anyway. Odom called and said that he had been mistaken—he'd been 200 missiles short in his missile count. In fact, 2,200 missiles had been launched. Brzezinski waited another minute. Odom called again. Our space probes did not detect any missiles. Odom called a fourth time: a tape simulating a Soviet attack had accidentally been left in a Pentagon computer—there had been no attack.

© 1996 by Jeff Syrop