I was Command & Control in AF for 24 years and this stuff happens perodically during exercises. I saw it happen twice, one time Reagen was woken and the other time the White House Sit Room had the sense to double check it before waking him again. Truth is I would rather get a false alarm than not get a warning during a real threat because of a fear of making a false alarm by the guy responsible
They had transitioned a pipeline with Y2K updates for the valves and stuff inside the pipe. One of them kept giving a false “closed valve” signal. They would send someone to drive out and manually check it and a half-hour later would hear back “Yeah - no - it’s open like you said it was - stupid sensor.”
This happened once-in-awhile with manual checks, put in a new sensor, rewrite software, etc.
I’m not sure if they ignored the signal regularily, or just once. But they sent a bunch of fet fuel down the pipeline and disregarded the “faulty” signal. Turns out that the valve WAS closed.
Things would have been okay, except just upstream from the valve the pipe had been damaged by an excavator several weeks/months prior. I guess “someone” did an inspection of the pipe and deemed it to be okay.
Well it wasn’t and the pipe ruptured when the pressure built up due to the closed valve. The fuel ran down into a river and a park. A fisherman died from the fumes. A bit farther two boys were playing with a lighter they had found - and the fuel ignited the whole park (and killed the boys).
Those two boys probably saved it from being a huge disaster as downstream from the park is a city with lots of people and all sorts of ignition sources.
Sorry for the long story. But is a good (bad?) example of how compounding failures can really start to add up, and we need to do our best with each link in the system.
I seem to recall a Cold War episode where we detected a launch by the Soviets (fake - was part of some simulation program that was entered improperly) but everyone thought it was real. So the President gets on the red phone direct link to the Kremlin - but there was some problem with that, so they thought the Russians were ignoring the call.