The bedford incident -cold war film

Originally Posted by jimbuna

Yeah, but it was hardly a shootout fitting the end of your usual war movie....sailor not paying attention is suddenly galvanised by the misinterpratation/context a a single word then the wake of torpedoes seen approaching....close the curtain

Real world experiance, during a live fire exercise the battery was laid, loaded and ready to fire the next serial in the fireplan. The young Gun Position Officer while relaying a situation report from the observers said "Guns, fire very effective on the last serial." However, as soon as he said the "F" word three of the four guns commenced firing and got off several rounds until he could get Check Firing acknowledged. Mine was one of them so I can see how the thing could happen when you're perhaps a bit too focused.

@SS
Yes, Fail-Safe is a superb movie and the USAF refused to cooperate with the producers so the B-58 Hustler was transformed into the fictional "Vindicator" for the aircraft action sequences. I first saw it as a kid in 1966 or so and it scared the crap out of me.

[sharkbit]

Originally Posted by Randomizer

@SS
Yes, Fail-Safe is a superb movie and the USAF refused to cooperate with the producers so the B-58 Hustler was transformed into the fictional "Vindicator" for the aircraft action sequences. I first saw it as a kid in 1966 or so and it scared the crap out of me.

Scary part is that it may not be too far fetched. A couple of times, NORAD had a computer failure which almost caused a few problems:

A quote from Wikipedia:

Even though all equipment in Cheyenne Mountain was put through a rigorous inspection, on at least two occasions, failure in its systems could have potentially caused nuclear war. On November 9, 1979, a technician in NORAD loaded a test tape but failed to switch the system status to "test", causing a stream of constant false warnings to spread to two "continuity of government" bunkers as well as command posts worldwide. A similar incident occurred on June 2, 1980, when a computer communications device failure caused warning messages to sporadically flash in U.S. Air Force command posts around the world that a nuclear attack was taking place. Both times, Pacific Air Forces properly had their planes (loaded with nuclear bombs) in the air; Strategic Air Command did not and took criticism because they did not follow procedure, even though the SAC command knew these were almost certainly false alarms (as did PACAF). Both command posts had recently begun receiving and processing direct reports from the various radar, satellite, and other missile attack detection systems, and those direct reports simply didn't match anything about the erroneous data received from NORAD.

Here's the link to the full Wiki article on NORAD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_A...efense_Command