Seek Immediate Shelter

Lisa Perry

My name is Lisa Perry and you're listening to at the brink, a podcast about the risk of nuclear disaster. How close we've come and how close we still are today.

January 13th, 2018 it was just a normal Saturday morning for Cynthia Lazaroff and her husband, Bruce Allyn. They were starting their day drinking coffee in their kitchen on the Island of Kauai, getting ready to go to the farmer's market.

Cynthia  Lazaroff

We were making our lists when our nephew suddenly burst into the house and he was out of breath. He'd clearly been running and he had his cell phone in his hand and he just ran over to Bruce and shoved it in his face and Bruce read it and was silent and said, I don't believe this.

Lisa Perry

His phone showed an emergency alert, ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. Bruce thought his nephew had been hacked, so he and Cynthia checked their phones, only to find the same message staring back at them from their screens.

Cynthia Lazaroff

Over a million of us got that text message on this island. And, people went through this process of, is it real? Where are my loved ones? Are they okay? I have to get to them. I have to connect with them. At that moment we realized the next thing was, you know, our girls are young, two younger daughters were in the town of Kapaa seven miles away. And Bruce said, I don't know if it's real or not, but I need to go get the girls.

Lisa Perry

Without another thought, Bruce jumped up and rushed off to get his daughters. He quickly realized that they were not the only ones who received that text message as he was joined by dozens of other cars speeding crazily down the highway. When he got to town, he saw signs of panic everywhere.

Cynthia Lazaroff

People just shoving their children into storm drains, not knowing what to do. People who have been sitting at a table seconds before squeezing into walk-in freezers to find a place and so many people going into their bathtubs.

Lisa Perry

Meanwhile, Cynthia was frantically calling everyone she knew to find out whether the alert was actually real. Finally, a journalist friend got back to her and confirmed that authorities were indeed telling residents to take shelter

Cynthia Lazaroff

And I, that's when I thought, Oh my God, this is real. I've now entered fully, I thought it might be real, but now I’ve fully entered a moment that I thought I would never see in my life.

Lisa Perry

This was a moment that Cynthia had actually thought about a lot in her lifetime. She has spent decades working on U.S.-Russian nuclear issues and in more recent years has produced numerous documentaries about nuclear weapons and escalating nuclear dangers.

Cynthia Lazaroff

I had spent the last year interviewing all these experts about all the different possible nightmare nuclear scenarios. They were all swirling through my head. They were all present. I didn't know which one it was.

Lisa Perry

Remember this was 2018, President Trump and North Korea. We're right in the middle of all of their fire and fury rhetoric, putting everyone in the country, especially people in Hawaii on edge.

Cynthia Lazaroff

I began to calculate, if it's North Korea and it's on its way, how many minutes do we have? But if it's Russia, might be a little bit longer. But the other thing was that if it's gotta be one or the other, let it be North Korea because if it's from Russia, you know, our two countries have more than 90% of the nuclear weapons. I knew that was game over for civilization and humanity,

Lisa Perry

But Cynthia had no time for math. She knew she had to act fast. Before Bruce left to get the girls, Cynthia and Bruce had agreed to shelter in a nearby cave on the coast. She looked around and frantically began to grab everything within reach.

Cynthia Lazaroff

I looked at my phone and it had 12% charge and I thought, Oh geez, this is my, this is my connection to the outside world. And then I looked at my computer and I thought, okay, my computer, my computer charger, I thought about radiation. And so I took a shawl to cover my face and then I thought about food and water for our family and I, we had some bananas that would harvest it the day before from the farm. I threw those bunch of bananas in a bag. And then I had two bottles of water, which you're supposed to have a gallon per day, per person for two weeks. And so at that moment I thought, Oh my God, I haven't done anything to prepare for this.

Lisa Perry

According to the government, you should have at least two week’s worth of food and water in the event of a nuclear attack along with emergency medical supplies, a flashlight and a battery powered radio. But Cynthia couldn't do anything about that. Now she just had to keep moving to get to shelter.

Cynthia Lazaroff

The very last thing I did was call my daughter in Los Angeles and I realize now having processed it, that if I'd called her one instant before that I would have never been able to hold it together. She picked up and I said, I, I just want you to know I love you. I don't know if you've heard the news, but we've just gotten this message on our cell phones telling us that there's a ballistic missile headed to Hawaii. And she just said, mom, she said, I love you too. And then, and then I stopped. I stopped for a moment and I just thought, am I ever going to see her again? Is this just here in Hawaii or is this the beginning of something that's much bigger than one ballistic missile to Hawaii? And is there only one?

Lisa Perry

When she finally got to the cave, Cynthia's neighbor was already there and told her that the Hawaii emergency management agency had announced that it was a false alarm. An employee had mistakenly triggered the alert believing an attack was imminent. It was an honest mistake. The alert only lasted 38 minutes, but those 38 minutes changed Cynthia's life forever.

Cynthia Lazaroff

It wasn't about my own death or my daughter's death or my family. It was the moment of realizing that this could be the end of civilization. Everything we know and love and cherish, gone. It was saying goodbye potentially to life, to all life. And so that's, that's what stayed with me. That's what is inside of me. It's visceral. It's, it's in my gut.

Lisa Perry

I was three years old when the Cold War ended. My generation is a post 9-11 generation. We grew up under the looming threat of terrorism, not Soviet missiles. When we picture the end of the world, we see melting ice caps, not mushroom clouds. When I thought of nuclear war, I thought of history class and Hollywood movies, but given who my grandfather is, I probably should have known better. My grandfather is William J. Perry. If you've never heard of him, in his 91 years on earth, he's been a Silicon Valley pioneer, a Cold Warrior, a Stanford professor, and the 19th Secretary of Defense of the United States. But to me, he was just granddad.

Hi grandad.

He took office when I was six years old and I didn't really understand what a secretary of defense did, just that it was a big deal.

I remember you gave me, you had custom pens that had your name on it, and that I think was to me at the time, the coolest things. Ooh, granddad has a special pen! But it wasn't until I read my grandfather's memoir that I really began to understand what he'd been doing all that time.

Bill Perry

My highest priority project was a project of dismantling nuclear weapons. And in a course of three year’s time, we actually dismantled about 8,000 nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry

In his book, my grandfather wrote that he thinks nuclear disaster is actually a greater threat today than it was during the Cold War and it made me realize we have a huge blind spot when it comes to the reality of nuclear weapons. His call to action galvanized me. For the past three years, I've been working side by side with my grandfather, learning about the nuclear dangers we face today. Through that work, I have been able to meet with people directly involved with these terrifying weapons. On this podcast, I'll be sharing their stories with you, stories from people who lived through the horrors of a nuclear bombing, stories from people who worked to smuggle over a thousand pounds of uranium from a former Soviet Republic to prevent it from falling to terrorists. Stories from people on the front lines of negotiations with Iran and North Korea, working to prevent them from developing their own nuclear weapons. In today's episode, we'll be learning something we were never taught in history class, how close we've come to triggering World War Three by accident. These are the stories of nuclear false alarms. My grandfather personally experienced one of the most dangerous false alarms in history. It was 1979 and he was the Under Secretary of Defense for President Carter.

Bill Perry

I was soundly sleeping one night when I got a phone call. When I picked up the phone, the voice on the other end identified himself as the watch officer at the North American Air Defense Command, and the first thing he said to me was that his computers were showing 200 nuclear missiles on their way from the Soviet Union to the United States. And for one horrifying moment, I believed we were about to witness the end of civilization. I can't really put words to it. It was just, I was stunned. I was just completely stunned and would've been lost for words if I had to say something.

Lisa Perry

My grandfather wasn't the first call the watch officer made that night. When the alert first came in, he contacted the White House. Because it was the middle of the night, the call went to President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. This was at the height of the Cold War, so when Brzezinski got the call, he assumed it was a real attack. Even so, he ordered confirmation of the Soviet launch before he woke the president. Sitting alone in the middle of the night. Brzezinski decided not to wake his wife. He wanted to spare her the terror of what he thought was going to be their last few minutes on earth. Just as Brzezinski was getting ready to wake the president, he received a third call, this time saying the other warning systems were not reporting any Soviet missiles. It was a false alarm.

Bill Perry

Had he awoken the president — middle of the night — no background information or anything, the president would have had to decide in less than five minutes whether to launch those missiles before they were struck in their silos. That's the kind of horrible decision that a president would have to make under those cases. And since the information he got was that there were 200 nuclear missiles coming to the United States, a major attack, he would undoubtedly have launched a major attack in return.

Lisa Perry

In the end, it took three days to figure out what had gone wrong. It turns out when they changed watch that night, the operator put in a training tape by mistake.

Bill Perry

What the computer was showing was a perfectly realistic simulation. It was designed to be realistic.

Lisa Perry

The simulation was so realistic that launch control centers for Minuteman missiles were put on alert and Strategic Air Command launched fighter jets to prepare to retaliate. Even though it was a false alarm, this incident left a permanent mark on my grandfather.

Bill Perry

It's changed forever my way of thinking about nuclear weapons. Up until then, a false alarm, an attack by mistake, starting a nuclear war by mistake, was a theoretical issue. But from that point on it was never theoretical to me, it was always very very real because it got me right in my guts. And it's affected my thinking and my actions to this day 40 years later.

Lisa Perry

40 years later, despite all our advances in technology, the danger of false alarms still remains. And the reason these false alarms are so dangerous is because we have an official policy of launch-on-warning. Some have called this a hair trigger alert.

Bill Perry

One of the firm beliefs in the U.S, and I think comparably in the Soviet Union as well, was the other side had a strategy, had a plan to attack us without warning. We were so focused on the fear that we would have a disarming surprise attack that we set up a system that was very sensitive and that would detect that attack early enough that we could actually launch our missiles before their attack hit the U.S. soil.

Lisa Perry

To understand how countries use nuclear weapons, you have to understand something called deterrence. Deterrence is all about dissuading your opponent from even considering an attack because they know you could retaliate with a devastating response. You may remember this part from history class. You know that infamous concept of MAD or mutually assured destruction. But what if one side thought they could destroy the ability of the other side to retaliate, by launching a surprise attack? MAD would have failed.

To prevent that possibility, we devised a system of sensors, satellites, and computers to detect any incoming missiles. That way if we thought a surprise was occurring, we could launch our missiles before they were destroyed in their silos. We called this launch-on-warning, but when you add false alarms into the mix, it turns into one big game of radioactive Russian roulette.

The false alarm my grandfather experienced was hardly unique. It wasn't even the first time our command and control system had been triggered by a training tape. There was the time a bear climbed a fence at an Air Force base and was mistaken for Soviet special forces. The time a faulty 46 cent computer chip mistakenly reported 2000 missiles on their way from the Soviet Union. The time the command center mistook a bunch of power outages for a coordinated attack. And those are just a few of the ones we know about. The most dangerous false alarm happened in 1983 in an incident that experts have said came closest to triggering an all-out nuclear war. It was only averted thanks to the extraordinary actions of a single person: a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet military, a man named Stanislav Petrov.

Taylor Downing

Human life would pretty well have come to an end across the planet had there been a full scale nuclear exchange in September, 1983.

Lisa Perry

That’s Taylor Downing, he’s an historian who literally wrote the book on what happened to U.S.-Soviet relations during that dangerous year.

Taylor Downing

Both sides had thousands, probably 18-20,000 nuclear warheads were held in the United States and were held in the Soviet Union. And as long as both sides knew that starting a war would be an act of national suicide to put it mildly then there was a certain balance. A balance of power or a balance of terror, if you like. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and he was talking tough. He had a very strong anti-communist belief, almost a religious belief in the evil of communism. He spoke about the Soviet Union as the evil empire. It was in this context that Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov began his 12-hour shift on the early warning missile alert station just outside Moscow

Lisa Perry

Although Petrov was an officer, he wasn't a professional soldier, he was an engineer. In fact, he was one of the people who helped design and install the early warning system. They call it OKO, which means “eye” in Russian

Taylor Downing

Petrov turns up to take over a 12-hour shift. It began at 8:00 PM Moscow time and was going to last till 8:00 AM. The shift begins perfectly normal, it's quite relaxed.

Lisa Perry

Because of his seniority, Petrov didn't normally work duty shifts, but as fate would have it, he had been asked to take the shift of someone who had called in sick that day,

Taylor Downing

Soon after midnight….a quiet day at a command center as it were… soon after midnight, a klaxon starts blaring out a penetrating sound, an alarm, and the word in Russian the word LAUNCH flashes up in giant red letters on the screen in front of Petrov.

Lisa Perry

The system had picked up an incoming missile. Petrov was shocked, but then he began to wonder if this was real. Why would the Americans attack with just one missile, that would be suicide! Plus in the back of his mind, he knew that they had rushed the OKO and a service and he was worried it might be malfunctioning, so he did what any good tech guy would do: he turned it off and back on again.

Taylor Downing

After a few seconds, he restarts the system and the same thing happens again. The klaxon comes on, the giant red letters that say the word launch in Russia are flashing in front of their eyes. By this point, the alarm has been sounded outside the missile station and the word was going up that an alert had been picked up in the early warning station. But Petrov stands by; he's still convinced, having been part of the team that introduced this, knowing that it really wasn't up to scratch, knowing that there were still glitches and problems and malfunctions that they hadn't fully worked through.

Lisa Perry

So he tried rebooting the system one more time

Taylor Downing

And when it came back on, the same thing happened again. This time it was telling them that two missiles had been identified. He begins to have doubts. He started at this point to feel very hot and sweaty. He suddenly couldn't feel his legs. He became so nervous. Was this really the start of World War Three? Was he absolutely sure that this was a false alarm? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was a genuine attack that his system has picked up.

Lisa Perry

His crew scrambled to find out what was going wrong with the system, but everything seemed to be working perfectly. Yet something still didn't seem right to Petrov. Most soldiers would have just reported the alert right away. But his engineering training and knowledge of the OKO system made him skeptical. Petrov made a judgment call, knowing his choice could be the deciding factor in the deaths of millions of people. He broke protocol and reported the alert as a false alarm.

Taylor Downing

People begin to realize that had this been a launch of missiles, other systems would have picked it up. So many minutes had gone by, 10-15 minutes have gone by, and no other system had picked up a missile launch in the United States. So they all begin to realize that yes, this is a false alarm, and that Petrov had been, had been right. We’re very, very lucky in retrospect, that the person on duty that night happened to be Stanislav Petrov, one of the people who would actually helped to install the system. And one of those who had serious doubts about the functioning of the very system he had been partly responsible for the installation of.

Lisa Perry

You might be wondering why you've never heard of this guy. Well, in true Soviet fashion, they covered it up. Instead of a medal, he got a demotion. Worse than that, Petrov spent the rest of his life afraid to tell anyone because he could have been sent to the Gulags. No one knew of Petrov’s fateful night until 2005 when another watch officer who had been on duty that night recounted the incident in an obscure magazine article. That article caught the attention of a Danish filmmaker named Peter Anthony.  Anthony was so compelled by Petrov's story, he was determined to meet this forgotten hero. Anthony spent months trying to track Petrov down until finally, an American journalist helped him find an address in a decrepit suburb of Moscow.

Peter Anthony

We took a bus and drove from Moscow airport outside the place where Stanislav lives. And you have all these like concrete buildings, rows and rows of concrete buildings, look like they’re almost falling apart. And we had, you know, a Russian driver with us and he was very afraid that we would get robbed and they would steal our equipment. So he was like, kind of a bodyguard. Then I went up to open the door of Stanislav Petrov’s home, and everything was just broken.

Lisa Perry

When Peter finally met this man who single-handedly may have prevented World War Three, it was not what he was expecting.

Peter Anthony

SuddenIy I saw this very little man standing in front of me and he was like, was just standing there, unshaven; looked like he hadn't been eating for months.

Lisa Perry

Anthony would go on to spend the next seven years working on a documentary about Petrov, trying to tell the story of this unassuming man whose choice to disobey protocol may have determined the fate of human civilization. While making the movie, Anthony and Petrov rehashed the false alarm many times. It took Petrov years to really open up about the trauma of that night and how it haunted him.

Peter Anthony

I said, how dangerous was that incident Stanislav, and he was telling me it destroyed my life, he said. No person on the planet can be, you know, you cannot prepare a person to make a decision about World War Three. It's unimaginable.

Lisa Perry

What happened that night was a freak occurrence. Something no one could have reasonably anticipated. The OKO was technically working perfectly, but September 26 was right after the Equinox. The sun, the Soviet satellite, and the U.S. missile fields all happened to line up in this insanely improbable way that caused sunlight reflecting from high altitude clouds to mimic a missile launch to the OKO’s alert system.

Peter Anthony

And I asked Stanislav, is that normal. He says like it was one of a billion of chance, a billion, a billion of a chance if this could happen. I mean, it's a one-in-a-lifetime situation this happened. Yeah, I'm really, really happy that he was in a position that night, but I don't think that human beings should be in that position at the first place. I think it's crazy.

Lisa Perry

Just like in the U.S. false alarm, here's another example of brilliant engineers using state of the art new equipment, but something happens that wasn't planned for a simple human error, a freak accident of weather. What else might happen that we're not even considering right now?

These are just two examples where false alarms nearly led us to disaster. So why do we still have launch-on-warning? To understand, we need to talk about the Triad. Both Russia and the U.S. have what's called a nuclear triad. Nuclear bombers in the air, submarines with nuclear missiles in the sea, and silos with nuclear missiles on land. The launch-on-warning policy only applies to our land-based missiles called Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs. In the early days of the Cold War, only ICBMS were big enough and accurate enough to take out Soviet missiles. But unlike the other weapons in the triad, the ICBMs are in fixed locations, so they can easily be targeted and taken out in a surprise attack. So the planners decided on a “use them or lose them” policy for the ICBMs. But nowadays our air and sea missiles are just as powerful and accurate as our land-based ICBMs. That means even if all of our land-based missiles were destroyed in a sneak attack, we would have more than enough nukes remaining in our subs, bombers, and cruise missiles to utterly destroy any country that launched such an attack, possibly destroying civilization as we know it. But despite all of these advances, we still have the same system we developed in the Cold War.

Bill Perry

Every system we have no matter how complex it is and how many safeguards is in it, any system is subject to human error. Every system is subject to the possibility of a machine error, a computer malfunction. That could happen again.

Lisa Perry

My grandfather has a pretty bold idea for how to solve this dilemma. He thinks the problem isn’t our policy of launch-on-warning, the problem is the ICBMs themselves, the weapons that launch-on-warning is supposed to protect.

So a lot of people have suggested that we should take our missiles off a launch-on-warning policy saying that this is what makes us susceptible to false alarms. But you actually go a step further. You think that we should get rid of the land-based leg of the nuclear triad entirely?

Bill Perry

Yes I believe that how many nuclear bombs we should have operational, that all of those bombs should be distributed among the submarine force and the bombers. And none of them on land-based ICBMs, for the simple reason that opens us up to the possibility of an accidental launch.

Lisa Perry

So your position on removing the land-based nuclear missiles as part of our nuclear deterrent is pretty controversial.

Bill Perry

it hasn't won me many bouquets among the defense community, that's quite right. And I haven't made many converts in the defense community either.

Lisa Perry

My grandfather isn't the only one concerned about this issue. There are a lot of very smart people arguing that ICBMs have become obsolete for deterrence. But so many in the defense committee seem to be stuck in the Cold War. To them, the winner is whoever has the biggest arsenal. Defenders of ICBMs argue that there is strength in numbers; more options provide a broader umbrella of protection. But that umbrella doesn't extend to protecting us from the danger of false alarms. The current generation of ICBMs was built in the 1970s and is set to be retired in 2030. The Defense Department could easily choose to phase these missiles out and consign them to the dust heap of history, but instead they are choosing to double down. The U.S. has recently approved a plan to completely replace our ICBMs with a new generation of missiles, projected to cost upwards of $100 billion. And this plan is just a small part of an even larger program set to expand our nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years. The price tag for this nuclear shopping spree, $2 trillion, and no one is talking about it

Bill Perry

In one sense I really, really hate to be a prophet of doom. On the other hand I realize that there are many things we can do to reduce the dangers we’re facing that we're not doing simply because we don't understand. The nature of the danger is not that Russia today or the Soviet Union during the Cold War was planning a pre-emptive strike against us. The danger is that we could blunder into a war. The dangers are very present, the realities of nuclear weapons are very present and, I think it's a conversation whose time has come for my generation.

I hope so because I have lost faith in my generation being able to deal with this problem. So I'm looking to the younger generation, you and your contemporaries, as being the ones who can solve these problems, but the first thing you have to do is educate yourself. nuclear dangers we face today, should we be dealing with them as the same way we were dealing with them in 1980. I don't think so but that's the question people should be asking themselves.

Lisa Perry

What kind of questions should we be asking about nuclear weapons? These weapons were supposed to make us safer, but after hearing about false alarms and the dangers of accidental nuclear war, do you feel safer?

Lisa Perry

If you liked our show or want to get involved, please subscribe and share our show with your friends. The more people that know about the problem, the closer we can come to pushing for a solution. To hear more stories of false alarms, and there's a bunch, and to learn what Cynthia Lazaroff has been doing since her incident in Hawaii, you can go to our website at atthebrink.org. You can also check out Taylor Downing's book 1983: The World at the Brink. Peter Anthony's fabulous documentary about Stanislov Petrov is called “The Man Who Saved the World,” and you can find it on Amazon Prime. Thank you to everyone involved in the production of this episode. At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. These organizations work tirelessly to combat the global threat of nuclear weapons around the world. At the Brink is produced by David Perry with editing help from project director Robin Perry, as well as Jeff Large and Maggie Doyle from Come Alive Creative. Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. This episode was produced in partnership with Harlow and Co. Thank you to all the people who consulted and contributed ideas to help get this project off the ground. You're helping us to try and save the world one podcast at a time. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening.