Colonel Odom’s “Chilling” Four A.M. Phone Call

Produced early in the Carter administration, as the White House was gearing up for various contingencies, this chart outlined the various types of conference calls that the National Military Command Center (NMCC) at the Pentagon could convene in various emergency or near-emergency situations. They included various notifications such as a Threat Assessment Conference Call in event of a suspect missile attack, DEFCON change calls, Air Activity, Air Emergency, and Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (applying to the Joint Staff, and Secretary of Defense). Various White House officials were listed as slated for participation.

All of the conference call types were serious, but among the most critical were the Missile Attack Conference Call and the NUCFLASH Conference Call. The former would occur in the event that the U.S. was under “actual missile attack” and was to include the national security adviser or the deputy and other White House officials. The NUCFLASH call would occur when the U.S. or the USSR provided notice of a “nuclear incident” involving “accidental, unauthorized, or unexplained launch of a missile or detonation of nuclear weapons.” The chart described the procedures for bringing the president into the calls.

Neither this document nor Document 2 mention the Missile Display Conferences prompted by satellite detection of infrared signatures, which could have many sources other than missile launches. Those conferences were routine events; in 1979, there were over 1500. If the situation appeared to be more serious, a Missile Display Conference could lead to a Threat Assessment Conference. That these procedures even existed became public information in 1980 when a Senate report described them in detail.[1] Their origins, however, are obscure. Whether the Carter administration established the conference call arrangements in the first weeks of its tenure or inherited the procedures from the Ford administration and its predecessors, or some combination of both, remains to be learned.

A discussion of emergency procedures occurred in mid-March 1977 at a meeting convened by Hugh Carter, the president’s first cousin, who was serving as his special assistant for administration. The discussants reviewed the conference call situations described above, with a briefer from the NMCC noting the important distinction between Threat Assessment Conference Calls, which did occur from time to time, and the Missile Attack Conference Calls and the NUCFLASH Conference Call, which so far had never occurred. Both would involve the President upon a decision by the “senior conferee,” the secretary of defense or the most senior official participating. The charts attached listed the “primary participants” in the calls and the officials who would be “monitoring” the calls (i.e., listening in).

Beginning in 1963, the U.S. and the Soviets had a Hotline in place to permit rapid communications and reduce risks during a crisis. Moscow and Washington updated the 1963 arrangements in a 1971 Hotline Agreement. That a September 1976 protocol updated the 1971 understanding has been buried in secrecy and obscurity, although some facts about the update can be found on the National Archives web site of declassified State Department telegrams. The agreement may have been negotiated under the auspices of the U.S.-Soviet Standing Consultative Commission (SCC), which was then chaired by Sidney Graybeal and General-Major G.I. Ustinov. Both of them signed the protocol.

The protocol established different emergency message formats for six different NUCFLASH situations, any of which carried the risk of nuclear war, such as an “accidental, unauthorized or any other unexplained incident involving a possible detonation of a nuclear weapon,” “detection by missile warning systems of unidentified objects,” or “detection of interference with missile warning systems or related communications facilities.” The forms of notification were not mandatory; the agreement allowed for flexibility for choosing notification contents and formats. The agreement was secret at the time and may not have been officially declassified until 2013, when the Carter Library released it.

After President Carter and top security advisers visited the National Military Command Center. Col. Odom reported some of his impressions from the briefings. Topics included the vulnerability of warning systems and command and control, the extent to which Soviet “strategic doctrine about limiting use of nuclear weapons” was changing, and Secretary of Defense Brown’s reluctance to announce a launch-on-warning policy. During the discussions, Brzezinski had asked about the problem of a false warning of attack. Odom reported that the Pentagon was preparing an answer, which became available with other information a few days later. It included details on false warning incidents and claimed that “there had been no false alarms since December 1976.”

William Odom would learn that false alarms were not that rare. A demonstration that Threat Assessment Conference Calls, sometimes generated by false warnings, would occur from time to time took place on 21 June 1978. For the White House, the call involved William Odom, who reported to Brzezinski that it was the third such call that year. Apparently a computer error in the Perimeter Acquisition Radar Characterization System (PARCS) had caused the false warning. Because PARCS had provided the warning at the end of the sequence of warning inputs, the “likelihood of an attack [was] very low from the beginning.” Odom noted that the “White House system of alerting worked very effectively [by] bringing in the WHCA switch in at 4:42 p.m.,” just when the call was beginning.

Odom reported to Brzezinski on an unusual Threat Assessment Conference Call, at four o’clock in the morning, based on a report of a SLBM launch off the U.S. west coast that would strike a point 150 nautical miles off the coast. While only one out of three radars had detected the launch, NORAD initially reported its “high confidence” in the warning. That the other two radars had not detected the launch led to a decision not to initiate a NUCFLASH call. A few weeks earlier, the PARCS system had reported accurately, with “high confidence,” on another event, but it was the descent of a “decaying space” object. A note on the map, possibly written by a White House Situation Room staffer and addressed to “Bill,” observed that the warning system had “malfunctioned,” but Odom was dubious because it had been a “high confidence” warning.

Odom observed that the phone call had been “chilling” and that he was a “little disturbed” by it. The conference calling process had been efficient, however, and he could have brought Brzezinski or even the president into the call, but since the data was “uncertain” no decision could have been made.

A few days after the false SLBM warning, Odom reported that it had yet to be explained. “space object could have been the basis for the sighting, but further investigation has made that look less probable.” The detection was made by the Air Force’s14^th Missile Warning Squadron, at Mt. Hebo Oregon, which operated an outmoded “Fuzzy 7” radar – Air Force terminology for the AN/FSS-7 – soon to be replaced by the PAVE PAWS system of phased-array radars. According to a 1980 Senate report, what the radar had detected was in fact a decaying rocket body. In the late winter of 1980, the Mt. Hebo radar generated another false alarm.[2]

A little over a month after the Mt. Hebo radar incident, on 9 November 1979, NORAD missile warning display screens mistakenly indicated an attack by 1,400 Soviet ICBMs, information that simultaneously appeared on warning consoles at the Pentagon, Strategic Air Command, and elsewhere.[3] The false warning resulted from the mistaken use of a nuclear exercise tape on a NORAD computer, an error that was quickly detected, but not before a few air defense aircraft and the NEACP [National Emergency Airborne Command Post] had been launched. The incident leaked to the press, which led to a statement of concern that General Secretary Brezhnev expressed in a letter to President Carter.

Along the margin of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s brief item on the Brezhnev message, President Carter wrote that he had not received a report on the incident nor an analysis of why it happened. “Why not?” he asked.

Brzezinski sent President Carter a report on the 9 November event, which has yet to surface publicly. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown also provided Carter with an analysis. The Pentagon’s release of the memo was massively excised, but the version retrieved at the Carter Library is complete. Trying to assure the president that the system had worked, Brown described the cause of the false alert and the immediately ensuing Threat Assessment Conference Call, assuring Carter that “as a result of this conference and the many quickly identifiable anomalies, the threat was clearly, correctly, and conclusively evaluated as spurious in less than six minutes of the first alarm.” Brown further assured the president that in “less than sixty seconds of initial alert” officials at SAC and the NMCC had detected “anomalies in warning indications which could not have been present had an actual mass attack been underway.”

The assurances notwithstanding, Brown acknowledged that the incident caused “me real concern and requires corrective actions.” The problems involving the NORAD computer and the hasty launching of air defense aircraft and the NEACP were being corrected, although there were still “bugs” to be fixed. An even larger issue, Brown observed, involved the “broader issue of the reliability, responsiveness, and human control over both our strategic warning system and our nuclear forces.” In those respects, Brown declared, government officials had successfully navigated the tricky circumstances: Command and control arrangements demonstrated a “high degree of responsiveness; safeguards against precipitate action; and a system design that places human judgment in a position to override computer mistakes.” “The key point is that the system corrects errors before they cascade in a dangerous way.”

Brown advised the president that one of the points that the government could make in public was that “At no time were the strategic nuclear forces activated – the incident was completely contained within the command and control community.”

More false warnings of missile attacks occurred on 3 and 6 June 1980, with the former taking place in the middle of the night. Odom wrote that he “monitored the [conference] call last night – eerie.” Harold Brown had to write more letters of explanation to the president; in one of them he wrote that he “consider[ed] the situation to be very serious.” In a follow-up letter to President Carter, Brown discussed causes and solutions, noting that what had happened was the failure of a “specific micro-electronic integrated circuit in a particular data communications interface device at NORAD.” Yet what had caused the circuit to produce false alarms on both days “is still unknown.”

To reduce future risks of false alarms, NORAD needed quality control. For example, it was setting up systems to weed out errors by incorporating “a very powerful error-detection technique known as cyclic redundancy codes (CRC) into the computer programs of the missile warning system.” That would ensure that the data that NORAD officials were seeing displayed on their screens was the same that was going to other command centers. New monitoring devices would “provide audible and visual alarms to the Systems Controller and the Missile Warning Officer at NORAD whenever a warning message is transmitted to the National Military Command Center or to Strategic Air Command Headquarters.” Thus, NORAD’s Systems Controller and Missile Warning Officer would be able to “expeditiously examine the validity of such messages.”

As worrisome as the recent false alarms had been, Brown told Carter that he had the findings of computer experts had assured him. They had concluded that even under the circumstances, “The checks and balances and practices are such that the events of June 3rd and June 6th, by themselves, could not have led to an improper use of nuclear weapons.” Even with Brown’s assurances, the president was not comforted. He wrote in the margins of Brown’s memo: “The deficiencies were/are serious.”