Yeah, yeah. Look up the "Black Brant Incident". Basically, the Russians were notified in advance of a joint US-Norwegian scientific rocket launch, but the Russian bureaucracy neglected to pass the information down to their early warning radar grunts.
The Russians thought the single "missile" was an EMP precursor attack, and went to full alert, and were a minute or two away from responding.
I remember it...and I remember Bill Clinton saying something like: “Did WW3 start? So what’s the problem?”
Not sure how that incident pertains to this crappy headline, though.