Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Today in 1983, “WarGames” premiered. In 2008, screenwriter Lawrence Lasker recounted to "Wired" how he arranged a special screening for President Ronald Reagan, who was a family friend, at Camp David the following evening.





At a White House meeting the next week to discuss the MX ICBM with his national security advisers and 16 members of Congress, Reagan eagerly recapped the plot, as former Washington Post correspondent Lou Cannon described in his 1991 book, “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.”

In his 2016 book "Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War", Fred Kaplan revisited this episode, adding that when Reagan finished, he asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Vessey, "Could something like this really happen?"

One week later, the general returned to the White House with his answer. “WarGames,” it turned out, wasn’t far-fetched. “Mr. president,” he said, “the problem is much worse than you think.”

Reagan’s question set off a series of interagency memos and studies that culminated, 15 months later, in his signing a classified national security decision directive, NSDD-145, titled “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security.”

The first laptop computers had barely hit the market; public Internet providers wouldn’t exist for another few years. Yet NSDD-145 warned that these new machines — which government agencies and high-tech industries had started buying at a rapid clip — were “highly susceptible to interception.” Hostile foreign powers were “extensively” hacking into them already; “terrorist groups and criminal elements” had the ability to do so, too.

General Vessey could answer the president’s question so promptly — and national-security aides could compose NSDD-145 in such detailed language — because, deep within the bureaucracy, a small group of scientists and spies had been concerned about this looming threat for more than a decade.

....
The main author of Reagan’s NSDD-145 was Donald Latham, the Pentagon’s liaison to the National Security Agency — and a former N.S.A. analyst himself. General Vessey had assigned him to answer Reagan’s question on “WarGames” (Could something like this really happen?). Mr. Latham answered as he did (The situation is much worse than you think.) because he knew that the N.S.A. had long been hacking into the communications systems of the Soviet Union and China — and what we were doing to them, they could someday do to us.

Mr. Ware had been among the first to draw this conclusion. Mr. Latham knew about it early on because the two were longtime friends, Mr. Ware having served on the N.S.A.’s scientific advisory board. The N.S.A. was the most secretive branch of the American intelligence community. Reagan’s screening of “WarGames” brought Mr. Ware’s concerns into high policy-making circles for the first time. And it sparked the first public controversy over the tensions between security and privacy on the Internet, as well as the first public power struggle about the subject between the N.S.A. and Congress — a debate and a struggle that persist today.

‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack

Surprisingly, "WarGames" was not inspired by the major nuclear false alarms at NORAD on Nov. 9, 1979, and at NORAD and SAC on Jun. 3 and 6, 1980. It originally concerned a dying Hawking-like scientist and his relationship with a smart, rogue teenager.


Someone went to the effort of converting "WarGames" into a 36-second GIF. SHALL WE PLAY A GIF?

Ironically, three years to the day before "WarGames" opened nationwide, this unsettling nuclear false alarm happened at NORAD:

June 3, 1980, at 2:26am EDT, warning displays at the Strategic Air Command suddenly indicated that a Soviet SLBM attack on the United States was underway, first showing 2 and then, 18 seconds later, 200 inbound missiles. SAC ordered all alert air crews to start their B-52 bomber engines.

About 20 seconds apart & the B-52's are near empty fuel on take-off and refueled in-flight once clear of the nuclear blast zone. MITO are exercises. Alerts are the real thing, meaning the bomber crews assume this is a ONE way mission and do NOT know if this a real nuclear bombing mission to wipe USSR off the map or an exercise. They assume it is REAL and do NOT know until they are called back...sometimes not for several hours of flight time. Watching this for real as a kid is something you never forget...Old clip from a SAC base in 1985 which doesn't do justice for the earth shaking, heart stopping & extreme roar that can be heard 5 miles away. Rolling down the runway they have lead shutters that cover the cockpit windows. In this vid they are taking off toward my house and over my house 10 seconds later. The massive exhaust trail is water injection 'smokin it up' which gives them extra thrust to get the hell outta dodge.

Minimum Interval Take Off (MITO) launch of 9 B-52s and 5 K-135s (tankers) in under 5 minutes:




Circling back to real life WarGames scenario 43 years ago, Launch officers for 1,000 Minuteman ICBMs were also alerted to be ready to receive an Emergency Action Message (a coded launch order). 3 minutes later, duty officers at NORAD determined this was a false alarm because early-warning satellites and radars indicated no attack.



Before that happened, however, Gen. William Odom, National Security Advisor (Zbigniew Brzezinski’s military asst.), called him at home, telling him 220 Soviet SLBMs were hurtling toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to call back with a confirmation and the likely targets.



This is according to former CIA Director Robert M. Gates 1996 memoir, "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War", the only place where this anecdote as recounted by Brzezinski to Gates, appears.

When Odom called back, he informed Brzezinski that 2,200 missiles were now on their way, practically the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal. As Brzezinski was preparing to call President Carter with the horrific news, Odom telephoned a third time to convey it was all a false alarm.

We don’t know whether Brzezinski ever went back to sleep that night. But we do know that he did not wake up his wife, Emilie (below), to tell her anything, because he later confided that he preferred she should be asleep when the nuclear warheads rained down on Washington, DC.



As it often takes 40 years (and longer to eternity) to discover/debunk mil/gov events some declassified contemporaneous notes taken by Gen. Odom published in 2020 by the National Security Archives raise questions about whether the early morning phone call described by Brzezinski ever happened. Brzezinski may have conflated two different (June 3 & June 6) nuclear false alarms.

Even after NORAD declared a false alarm, displays at SAC, the National Military Command Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center (Site R, aka Raven Rock) continued to intermittently indicate SLBM and ICBM launches. So at 2:39am, the NMCC convened a Missile Display Conference.

10 minutes later, with NORAD still assessing the warning data as false, the NMCC escalated to a Threat Assessment Conference. At this point, Pacific Command prepared to send its emergency airborne command post into the air. At 2:53am, Commander-in-Chief United States Atlantic Command (CINCLANT) incorrectly reported SLBM launches.

At 2:54am, NORAD continued to report no indications of any actual launches. At 2:56am, US Pacific Command (PACOM) for reasons that remain unclear—scrambled its EC-135 airborne command post, "Blue Eagle" (part of Operation Looking Glass, aka Doomsday plane) based at Hickam AFB, Hawaii which would remain aloft for 3.5 hours for "routine airborne alert."




NMCC terminated the conference at 2:57am. The entire incident lasted 31 minutes. A subsequent investigation traced the cause to a defective 46¢ integrated circuit in a NORAD communications multiplexer, which sent test messages on dedicated lines from NORAD to other command posts.

Big OOooops:

Supposedly causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."

About seven months later, U.S. warning systems generated three more false alerts. One occurred on 28 May 1980; it was a minor harbinger of false alerts on 3 and 6 June 1980. According to the Pentagon, what caused the malfunctions in June 1980 was a failed 46¢ micro-electronic integrated circuit ("chip") and "faulty message design." A computer at NORAD made what amounted to "typographical errors" in the routine messages it sent to SAC and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) about missile launches. While the message usually said "OOO" ICBMs or SLBMs had been launched, some of the zeroes were erroneously filled in with a 2, e.g. 002 or 200, so the message indicated that 2, then 200 SLBMs were on their way. Once the message arrived at SAC, the command took survivability measures by ordering bomber pilots and crews to their stations at alert bombers and tankers and to start the engines.

Yet, defense officials have been reluctant to acknowledge organizational failings, instead blaming mistakes on 46¢ chips or individuals inserting the wrong tape. Treating the events of 1979 and 1980 as "normal accidents" in complex systems, Sagan observes that defense officials are reluctant to learn from mistakes and have persuaded themselves that the system is "foolproof."

The 3 A.M. Phone Call

Later that month, the Department of Defense tried to downplay the incident—and a second similar false alarm three days later when technicians recreated the June 3 incident in order to diagnose it—and reassure the public by arguing that ~50 previous alerts in 1979 were all valid. Nothing to worry about, go back to sleep.






In 1960, a military test pilot is caught in a time warp that propels him to year 2024 where he finds a plague has sterilized the world's population.Filmed on and around Carswell Air Force (SAC) Base (closed in 1994) near Fort Worth, Texas.



Have we tried group singing yet? Did it work for the French?



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