Washington, D.C., March 24, 2022 – At four in the morning on 3 October 1979, Colonel William Odom, military assistant to national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, received a phone call from the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center informing him that an Air Force missile warning system had detected a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launch off the coast of Oregon. It turned out to be a false alarm, but Odom told Brzezinski the experience was “chilling” and made him “wonder how to use the remaining four or five minutes” before the missile struck and set off a cataclysm. Today the National Security Archive is posting a number of records related to Odom’s early morning episode, complementing a previous publication on the most prominent false warnings from 1979 and 1980 that raised serious questions about the inadvertent triggering of nuclear war. Today’s E-book further adds to the history with previously unpublished records on incidents from the same time period, which were sparked by reports that over a thousand missiles were en route to U.S. territory. Featured is a little-known protocol signed in September 1976 that updated an earlier U.S.-Soviet 1971 revision of the Hotline Agreement and went into effect in March 1977. It appears this agreement may have been entirely secret until the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library released it in 2013. All of the documents in today’s publication are from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. Among other important topics they cover in fresh detail are the various kinds of conference calls the National Military Command Center would set up during emergency or near-emergency situations, including the Missile Attack Conference Call, the NUCFLASH Conference Call, and the Threat Assessment Conference Call Odom participated in. |
