You know, it was just it bounced, and it was gone. You know how you would- or one of those old drinking games where you bounce something and land it into the hole perfect. It was almost like- it was like somebody playing Tiddlywinks or something. It was like it bounced, and it landed perfectly in the gap, you know. One involves ships.įrom WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. They're mistakes that, at most jobs, would mean nothing, mistakes maybe you've made yourself. In both of these stories, the slip-ups that people make are so small. Today on our program, we have two stories like that. And so you can make mistakes on a scale the rest of us can't. Fortunately, most of us work jobs where the mistakes we make do not result in millions of people dead or anybody dead.īut if you work for the US military, even when we're not at war, you can be surrounded at your job by gear whose whole purpose is to kill people.
This kind of mistake, the technician who put the training exercise into the computer, is squarely in the category of human error.Īnd human error mistakes are especially terrifying because you never can fully do away with them. It was later discovered that a technician had accidentally put a training exercise into the computer simulating a full-scale attack. Fighter jets took off.īefore the president was asked to decide whether to retaliate, one person, a watch commander, thought something was not right and threw on the brakes. Crews responsible for launching our missiles were put on highest alert. The military response was fast and dramatic. In November 1979, at the Nuclear Defense Command Headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, computer screens suddenly showed that Soviets had launched nuclear missiles, hundreds of them, a full-scale attack on the United States.
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