This risk of nuclear war by accident is not a theoretical scenario. Perry and Collina note that the United States has experienced three major false alarms, and Russia has had two. For example, on June 3, 1980, the U.S. received a warning that Soviet submarines had launched 220 nuclear-armed missiles at the United States, a figure later presumed to be 2,200 missiles – an all-out attack. Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski estimated that he had three minutes to decide whether to tell the president of the potential attack, and that the president would then have four minutes to make a decision on whether to launch U.S. weapons. Just as Brzezinski was about to call the president, it was determined that it was a false alarm. It was later learned that it was the result of a malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip embedded in a communications device.

How Not to Blunder Into a Nuclear War