Causes of False Missile Alerts: The Sun, the Moon and a 46-Cent Chip<br />Us Die said that Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself —<br />Preparing for his regular Saturday afternoon radio broadcast, President Ronald Reagan quipped in a live microphone<br />that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever" and that "we begin bombing in five minutes." Months later, The Times reported that two days after President Reagan’s joke, a low-level Soviet military official ordered an alert of troops in the Far East.<br />The report thrust Norad to its maximum alert level, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, but officials later determined<br />that the radar had been fooled by the "moonrise over Norway." Computers at Norad indicated that the United States was under attack by missiles launched by a Soviet submarine.<br />"The tape simulated a missile attack on North America, and by mechanical error,<br />that information was transmitted into the highly sensitive early warning system, which read it as a ‘live launch’ and thus initiated a sequence of events to determine whether the United States was actually under attack," The Times reported.<br />Ten jet interceptors from three bases in the United States<br />and Canada were scrambled, and missile bases went on "low‐level alert," The New York Times reported.<br />Here is a look at a few cases when it did: A false alarm came when an early warning radar in Greenland reported to North American Air Defense Command headquarters<br />that it had detected dozens of inbound Soviet missiles.
