Daniel Craig’s Skyfall, blasphemous to the whole idea of James Bond yet one of the best among the later Bonds, has a very interesting conversation between James Bond and a younger Q. Responding to Q’s claim that he is capable of causing much more damage through his laptop, sitting in his pyjamas prior to his first cup of Earl Grey, than Bond could do in a year in the field, Bond sarcastically asks: then why do you need me? Q politely responds that it is because “every now and then, a trigger has to be pulled.” “Or NOT pulled … it’s hard to know which in your pyjamas!” Bond retorts.

This conversation sums up the rationale of nuclear command and control. Stanislav Petrov confronted exactly this on 26 September 1983. On that day, Petrov, the deputy chief for Combat Algorithms at the Soviet Union’s Serpukhov-15, decided not to pull the trigger. The early warning system beamed that a missile fired from Montana was heading towards Moscow. Within minutes, the system indicated that several more missiles were heading towards the USSR. Petrov followed his instinct instead of protocol and decided to wait. After a brief yet nerve-racking wait, Petrov was relieved to know that it was a false alarm due to a system malfunction.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event. Four years earlier, in 1979, the North American Aerospace Defence (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado, as well as the Strategic Air Command Centre, were alerted that Moscow had initiated a large-scale nuclear attack........

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