At 3:00am on November 9, 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, was awoken by a terrifying phone call.

According to North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD officials, the Soviet Union had just launched hundreds of ballistic missiles with a direct trajectory for the continental United States.

America was about to be nuked by Russia.

In retaliation for this alarm, all air defense interceptors were activated, and at least ten warplanes took to the sky, including the president's doomsday plane.

Even a few air traffic controllers were ordered to ground all commercial aircraft immediately.

Still, at no point were POTUS or the Secretary of Defense notified.

In the 1979 NORAD alert, a mix of Soviet-inspired paranoia, human error, and early computer technology caused a nearly catastrophic blunder at the United States' top missile defense compound, leading to one of the closest calls of the Cold War...

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