Technically it want an order but malfunctioned alert system. He made a good guess that it's just a glitch and neglected the protocol which saved millions and countries but he got a warning for not following the protocol... Just another day at military I suppose.
Context matters. If there are no escalations happening in world politics, why would there suddenly be an order to launch?
If the same glitch happened while Russian leaders are going hint hint nudge nudge towards their nuclear arsenal, would that operator do the same thing?
Maybe the worst thing about nukes isn't that the button will be pressed on purpose, but that some damn fool thing will happen on accident and things happen before anyone can take stock of the situation.
No idea what you're taking about tbh. As I said there was no order and it was during cold war iirc. Not sure what you mean by Russian leaders using glitch as an excuse. If it happened there would be no one left to blame.
I mean that right now, Putin is in a war where he's actively reminding the rest of the world that they have nukes to use. If an order comes down to launch now, that's different than an order that comes down when nothing else is happening.
He made a decision of the kind you generally have to make when working with systems which can cause mass destruction by design or by error. I'm pretty sure many other people have done similar things in USSR and in USA and in France etc
Fun fact: For Oliver Stone’s Putin documentary, the two of them sat and watched Dr. Strangelove, on camera. It was as tense and awkward as you might expect.
Officially we don't. We merely have American military bases with American planes and suspicious payloads that the government refuses to comment on.
I've wondered what that would mean in practice in different scenarios. If NATO command structure was atomized (RIP the city of Mons, no-one really liked you but thanks for the sacrifice o7), would the Belgian army make the call to fire ze missiles anyway? Or does the highest-ranked American make that call?
Noncredible answer: That terrible, poor, almost-french city hasn't managed to finish its train station in decades (it's 1000 % over budget and 10 years late). This demonstrates why their population has therefore rightly been declared as expandable to protect Brussels.
