Just past midnight on September 26th, 1983 — three weeks after the Soviets shot down a passenger airliner, with the Cold War at its coldest — a computer screen in a secret bunker lit up with one word: LAUNCH. Then another. Five American missiles, it said. Confidence: certainty. The duty officer had minutes, no second opinion, and one doubt.
The Society convenes in special session for CASE FILE #004: the Oko early-warning system, the sunlight that impersonated armageddon, and Stanislav Petrov — the engineer who doubted an honest machine. Every case in our files ends with a machine doing exactly what it was told. This is the night that obedience was the danger.