The Third World War: August 1985

A system that had to have the highest reliability that man’s ingenuity could devise was inevitably hyper-sensitive, and operators highly trained in monitoring the auditory and visual responses grew instinctively to feel the computer’s mood. Occasionally, even in peacetime, the alerting bell would sound as particles or atmospheric conditions produced a response from space that the computer took longer than usual to analyse. When it was identified as innocuous the computer would apologize seconds later and explain its over-eagerness.

This was the way it was meant to work, and it was the pattern to which the controller and his staff were accustomed. During the last two weeks at Fylingdales and its sister stations in Alaska and Greenland bells had sounded frequently as the Soviet rockets launched more satellites into orbit to maintain their space activities. There had been plenty going on.

The station was a sitting-duck target for an air attack but no guided weapon had come anywhere near it. This was not surprising — indeed it was to be expected — because it was very much in the interests of the Russians, in their non-nuclear war policy, not to risk anything that might so much as vibrate the hair-trigger of the Allied nuclear response. For the same reason the persistent jamming to which the other electronic warning systems had been subjected from the sea and air had not been directed against BMEWS. There was an occasional indication from badly tuned airborne equipment to remind the crew that the electronic battle was still in progress, but otherwise the displays were clear.

At 1005 hours a neighbouring air defence radar warning station rang to say it was no longer affected by jamming. Wing Commander Warburton, the Controller, entered this in his log and thought it curious enough to tell his controller colleagues in the other operational centres. An airwoman brought round the tea. It was all very different from the smoke, dust, blood and horror of the battle raging in the Central Region — but they were concerned here with a different kind of war. Warburton had finished his tea when an American controller from the Detection and Tracking Centre at Colorado Springs called to say that they had detected a launch via a warning satellite over the Indian Ocean. It had come from a distance, west of Baikonur, the site from which the satellite launches had been flying during the last sixteen days, and they had not reconciled it. It would not be visible within the Fylingdales detection range for a while, and he said he would call back as soon as they had any tracking information on it.

The line to the Springs was crystal clear. The whole watch had strained their ears to piece together the message and they had all mentally worked out where the response would appear on the display before the American controller had finished what he had to say. There was a scraping of chairs as each one took up a position so that he could see over the observer’s shoulder. The seconds ticked by and the radar movement seemed more sluggish than it had ever been before. Suddenly there it was: the next scan of the radar confirmed it and the computed display gave a very firm digital threat assessment on one missile on an approaching path. Instantaneously the threat light flashed and the tracking radar slewed.

The Royal Air Force control staffs were well used to calming their adrenalin flow, both through exercises simulated on magnetic tape and by the frequency with which bells punctuated the various steps in the computer process, but this had a very different feel about it. A single missile launch against the UK or the US was a highly improbable event, but the confident mood of the computer had come through to them, and with war raging in Europe anything could happen. Very definitely something was happening now.

It was twenty-four minutes past ten when the digital display abruptly upgraded the threat as the tracking radar picked up the missile soaring out of the atmosphere into space. The computer instantly calculated that it was on a sub-orbital trajectory with 353 seconds to impact. The whole watch was galvanized: if this was a real nuclear attack how could a single missile on its own make any sense? The digital warning display had gone instantaneously to all the other operations centres, including the Government Situation Room, but the Controller pressed the switch which connected them all on the voice circuit to confirm, even though they could make no sense of the alarm, that the BMEWS was 100 per cent serviceable and that the computers were continuing to upgrade the threat assessment.