How Steve Carlton Got His 300th Win

The Wayback Machine: September 26, 1983, the day a satellite glitch almost ended the world

Just about every week, we like to celebrate the anniversaries of watershed events in technology history. Along with as many digressions as I can find. Today we are going to set our Wayback machine to…

…September 26, 1983, the day the world almost ended in a nuclear war. Don’t remember that? That’s because nobody told you about it until years later. September 26, 1983, was just another Friday most of us were slogging through on our way to Friday night. The only people who might remember that day might be rabid baseball fans. That was the day Phillies Hall of Fame pitcher Steve Carlton notched his 300th win, beating the Cards.

The Cold War was still on, and one of the staunchest cold warriors, Ronald Reagan, was in the White House. On March 8th, 1983, Reagan made the Cold War even more tense by calling the Soviet Union the Empire of Evil.

The “Evil Empire” stuff was playing well with Reagan’s base, but it wasn’t particularly reassuring to Americans worried about being obliterated because of his recklessness. Remember – this is the guy who a year later would be caught on tape saying this:

RONALD REAGAN: My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

BRIAN SANTO: That was nominally a joke, but if Reagan only knew how very NOT funny that was.

The Cold War was already intense, and it just got worse in September of 1983. On September 1st that day, the Soviets shot down a Korean passenger jet that had strayed over Soviet airspace; 269 people died.

It’s not as if after that most people were walking around actively fretting about a potential nuclear strike, but even though MOST people weren’t actively fretting about a potential nuclear strike, SOME people were. And most of THOSE people were serving in the military of the Evil Empire.

So on September 26th, 1983, when the Soviet Union’s band new space-based Nuclear Early Warning System reported the launch of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile from a base in the U.S., the Soviets had every reason to believe that they might be under attack.

The only reason you’re listening to this right now is a guy named Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. Petrov was the officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces that day who was responsible for retaliating in case there was an attack, and – he just didn’t believe it. If the Americans were going to strike first, why send only one missile?

And then the Soviet Nuclear Warning System reported four more missiles had been launched. But Petrov remained skeptical. Five was still a small number of missiles to start a war with, plus there was nothing on radar, and, you know… the Nuclear Warning System WAS brand new.

Those alerts were, in fact, false alarms. The explanation we have today is that they’d been triggered because of some weird alignment of the satellite orbits and sun bouncing off high-altitude clouds.

Anyway, Carlton got his 300th win that night, and nobody outside of Russia heard anything about everybody almost dying until the 1990s. Petrov was subsequently the subject of a documentary, “The Man Who Saved the World.”

And the moral of the story is: Geez! Technology, right?

A lot of the information for this Wayback Machine segment is from an article from our sister publication, EDN. We’ve got a link on the web page to the story, titled “Satellite error nearly causes nuclear war.”

And that’s a wrap for the Weekly Briefing for the week ending October 2nd. Thank you for listening. The Weekly Briefing is available on iTunes, Android, Stitcher and Spotify, but if you get to us via our web site at www.eetimes.com/podcasts, you’ll find a transcript along with links to the stories we mentioned, along with other multimedia.

This podcast is Produced by AspenCore Studio. It was Engineered by Taylor Marvin and Greg McRae at Coupe Studios. The Segment Producer was Kaitie Huss.

I’m Brian Santo. See you next week.

BRIAN SANTO: I have one last question for you. Do you really understand quantum computing?

JEFF WELSER: I think anyone who says they understand quantum computing’s never actually learned anything about quantum computing. Actually, I say that tongue in cheek. But I do think that one of the jokes that we have around the lab… in fact, actually, our quantum computing team made up some stickers to put on our laptops. “You’re thinking too classically.”

Because really I think that is the biggest struggle for those of us as we work in the quantum computing world. It really is a different way of doing computation. It’s completely different than the way we think about computation today in terms of writing programs and things. For electrical engineers, I reckon it’s more similar to when you hook up logic gates and norgates or something to actually create a circuit they then would do a computation. That’s sort of where we are with quantum. And unfortunately in this case, the gates are all quantum gates, so their effects are all probablistic and you have to really understand how that’s going to combine.