2016 Sept 18... On CBS 60 Minutes...Former Secretary of Defense William Perry admits in 1979 nuclear war almost happened. Although, he did not give the exact date in 1979. Is he talking about the Command and Control Book reported date of November 1979? It would seem he is as the stories match. So this does not seem to match the other incident reported in AZ Highways Magazine.
Full Video interview at CBS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-new-cold-war-nuclear-weapons-david-martin/
Quoting from 60 Minutes:
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry was a key architect of nuclear weapons during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
David Martin: If the weapons can be launched within minutes does that mean we’re still in the same-old, hair-trigger--
William Perry: Yes.
David Martin: --standoff that we were during the Cold War?
William Perry: That’s right. And we still have launch on warning, the same policy we had then. We still have the same hair-trigger response.
David Martin: So what’s changed since the Cold War if we’re still on this hair-trigger alert?
William Perry: Fundamentally nothing has changed.
David Martin: But the numbers of weapons are much lower now than during the Cold War.
William Perry: The number of weapons are sufficient to destroy, obliterate all of civilization.
David Martin: Still?
William Perry: Still. It doesn’t take that many. We still have more than 1,000 nuclear weapons on alert ready to go. It doesn’t take 1,000 to destroy civilization.
At the end of the Cold War both sides pledged to point their missiles at the open ocean. But it would take just minutes to change back to real targets.
That provides a small hedge against an accidental war triggered by a false alarm of the kind Perry experienced in 1979 when a watch officer mistakenly inserted a training tape into a computer.
William Perry: It looked like 200 ICBMs were on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. Happily we got that situation figured out before we had to go to the president. But had we not he would have received a call at 3 o’clock in the morning and said, “Sir you have seven or eight minutes to decide whether to launch those before these missiles land on our ICBM silos.
David Martin: And what was the fail-safe there? What stopped it from going to the president?
William Perry: What stopped it was an astute general who sensed something was wrong.
David Martin: You’ve had one serious case in 45 years, that would seem like a pretty good record.
William Perry: It only takes one – it only takes one.