Barely a month into its already floundering invasion of Ukraine and Russia is rattling its nuclear saber and threatening to drastically escalate the regional conflict into all out world war. But the Russians are no stranger to nuclear brinksmanship. In the excerpt below from Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie's latest book, we can see how closely humanity came to an atomic holocaust in 1983 and why an increasing reliance on automation — on both sides of the Iron Curtain — only served to heighten the likelihood of an accidental launch. The New Firelooks at the rapidly expanding roles of automated machine learning systems in national defense and how increasingly ubiquitous AI technologies (as examined through the thematic lenses of "data, algorithms, and computing power") are transforming how nations wage war both domestically and abroad.

Excerpted from The New Fire: War, Peacem, and Democracy in the Age of AI by Andrew Imbrie and Ben Buchanan. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Imbrie and Ben Buchanan. All rights reserved.

THE DEAD HAND

As the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached their apex in the fall of 1983, the nuclear war began. At least, that was what the alarms said at the bunker in Moscow where Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty.

Inside the bunker, sirens blared and a screen flashed the word “launch.”A missile was inbound. Petrov, unsure if it was an error, did not respond immediately. Then the system reported two more missiles, and then two more after that. The screen now said “missile strike.” The computer reported with its highest level of confidence that a nuclear attack was underway.

The technology had done its part, and everything was now in Petrov’s hands. To report such an attack meant the beginning of nuclear war, as the Soviet Union would surely launch its own missiles in retaliation. To not report such an attack was to impede the Soviet response, surrendering the precious few minutes the country’s leadership had to react before atomic mushroom clouds burst out across the country; “every second of procrastination took away valuable time,” Petrov later said.

“For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he recounted. He felt like he was sitting on a hot frying pan. After quickly gathering as much information as he could from other stations, he estimated there was a 50-percent chance that an attack was under way. Soviet military protocol dictated that he base his decision off the computer readouts in front of him, the ones that said an attack was undeniable. After careful deliberation, Petrov called the duty officer to break the news: the early warning system was malfunctioning. There was no attack, he said. It was a roll of the atomic dice.