This short article in Wired recalls a story from 1983, when a Soviet military officer helped avert a war with the United Sates. He was monitoring the ICBM early warning satellite system, when it alerted him that the US had launched ballistic missiles at Moscow. Following his gut feeling, he nervously decided that it was just a false alarm, and did not start the retaliation process.
The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union. The “START” command Petrov was expected to give would have started an irreversible chain reaction in a system geared to launch a counter-strike without human interference.
“The main computer wouldn’t ask me [what to do] - it was made so that it wouldn’t even ask. It was specially constructed in such a way that no one could affect the system’s operations.” All that was up to Petrov was analyzing the available information and either saying the alarm was false or giving the computer the go-ahead, as per the directive he himself wrote.
Since it was, in fact, a false alarm, Petrov can be called a hero. But on the other hand, what good is a system like this if the operator just goes on his gut reaction? The real problem seems to be that he knew how unreliable the early warning system really was, and this lack of trust is what prevented him from acting on the alert.
I can’t help but be reminded of modern day network intrusion detection systems. Except that they can spew out thousands of false alarms a day, especially when they’re not properly configured and tuned. What network security operator would react to an incident based solely on an IDS alert? I doubt any would, not without first manually validating that something actually happened. These systems would be a lot more valuable and efficient if we could trust them.
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