@Tim - Yeah but then someone makes a mistake and things get nasty in a hurry.
I read someplace that during the Reagan years he had the USAF do these blitz runs at Russian airspace that gave all appearances of being first strike missions before breaking off at the last minute. Apparently there was a couple of times that nervous USSR military personnel thought WWIII was under way and nearly responded in kind before they were stopped.
Back in the cold war, and probably still, there were stations set up to launch missiles at incoming Soviet bombers. Like any good military operation, they would run drills. The purpose of the drill was to go from 'identified threat' to 'missile away' as quickly as possible, and certainly within some designated acceptable time.
So this friend of mine was stationed at one of these places. Their drills defined the operator mashing his thumb on the flip cover over the fire button as 'missile away end of drill', and the CO walking in and pointing out some airliner coming over the pole as the 'identified threat start the clock'.
Then they got a new CO, who we will call Joe Gung Ho. The first time they run a drill, Joe Gung Ho gives them an unsatisfactory mark, saying they did not follow the procedure. There it is, right there in black and white; "lift the safety cover" is the last step before pressing the launch button. According to Joe Gung Ho
only the final pushing of the launch button is supposed to be simulated, else the drill is unrealistic.
Now, in the course of any sort of launch activity, drill or not, there is a guy assigned to 'man the phones' and relay orders from the command center to the rest of the facility, but incoming communications also come in on a speaker in the control center. It sort of gives the officer of the deck an opportunity to respond faster, but also keeps the routine information from demanding immediate attention.
So there is heated dispute about whether this lifting of the safety cover to expose the launch button for a live missile was really a good idea, particularly with the missile targeting a civilian airliner. Joe Gung Ho gets his way. Being the CO that was unfortunately the only possible end to the debate.
A couple drills go by.
Then one fine day as the operator reluctantly flips up the safety cover and simulates pushing the launch button, person or persons unknown somewhere out in the facility pop off a CO2 fire extinguisher into a sound powered phone, and the control room speaker produces God's own roaring noise, accompanied by a shouted "Missile away! Wasn't this a drill?"
Joe Gung Ho was never quite the same.
