April 23, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Bob Winston’s day began like any other day. He woke early, at 4:30 am, shaved, showered, and dressed before heading downstairs for his usual breakfast of coffee, a banana, and a yogurt. His commute to work was uneventful, and as he sat at his desk, he had no inclination that today he would save the world.

“I sat at my desk, turned on my computer, completed the company-mandated password challenge, then entered my username and password to log in to the network,” a humble Bob said when asked about yesterday morning. “After that, I simply entered a different password into the computer to access the group folder. Then it was simply reentering my usernames and passwords six more times to bring up the day’s files. To be honest, and don’t tell my boss, I did a little online shopping and read the news! That was just me entering my usernames and passwords on the four websites I was shopping, trying to find a gift for my wife. I like to catch up on the news by entering my usernames and passwords on the three news sites I read.”

Bob does not say that when signing into his Amazon account, he accidentally mistyped “Amazon,” which brought him to a covert dark web portal operated by the Russian FSB responsible for maintaining and, if necessary, activating the Russian nuclear arsenal. “I had no idea!” said Bob, laughing at his innocent mistake. “At first, it looked like the normal Amazon front page. I try to be an attentive husband, and my wife had mentioned in passing that she was interested in reading Atomic Habits for work. I entered Atomic Habits in the Amazon search field and was brought to a subfolder that had nothing to do with the book! I figured Amazon had a glitch on their site and decided to try again later. Claire, my wife, had also mentioned that she had spoken with Mildred, our neighbor, who said her husband Martin was planning on playing in an Under 35 softball league this summer. Being a bit older than Martin, I wondered if there were any Over 35 leagues, as I loved playing baseball. I thought I typed in “U35 leagues”, but I must have accidentally hit the 2 and 3 together and typed “U235″ instead. Well! Let me tell you, that brought me to an exciting site! My screen filled with schematics of missiles in bunkers and aboard submarines. What the heck is this, I thought!”

At the same time in Virginia, Virginia Sims began her morning at the NSA. “Yeah, just another manic Monday, I thought,” said Ms. Sims. I spent the first three hours of my morning, just like every other morning, signing into the various networks, folders, and files. I’m no different than anyone else. Just an endless series of usernames and passwords! Every day, three or four sites require me to update my password because they are outdated.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to develop a new variation on a password. There are just so many to remember!” laughs Ms. Sims. When she signed on to the last network, Ms. Sims’s screen was filled with a red background and the words “Russian Nuclear Arsenal Operational!”

“Well, you can imagine, my heart jumped into my throat! I had been listening to an audiobook on the way to work and hadn’t caught up on the news, so I was entirely in the dark about whatever geopolitical drama was unfolding!

I called my boss, but he needed to remember the password to his network. He reset it on Friday, but he forgot to write it down! He struggled to remember it, and more than once forgot to enter that he was not a robot which kicked him back to the beginning. Once he did remember it, he told me he was booted twice again when he didn’t correctly select all the photos containing stoplights or, what was it, crosswalks?”

“Anyway, he finally got signed in and saw the message I had sent him. He called me immediately and said he was unaware of any crisis but would contact the CIA and Pentagon to confirm we hadn’t missed anything.”

As Ms. Sims waited to hear back from her boss, Bob Winston struggled to get back to what he thought was a search for a softball league.

“The screen with the missiles and submarines looked real enough, but my son sometimes plays video games on my computer at home. I figured maybe the sign-on information he used for his Xbox had migrated to my work computer because the credit card was tied to me. Anyway, I’m curious, so I clicked on one of the missiles.”

“Instantly, the missile turned red, and I was brought to a different screen showing a list of coordinates. I’m not a cartographer, so I didn’t know what the latitude and longitude numbers meant! All I saw was SS-27 Mod 2 (Yars) and many numbers. It looked fun, so I clicked the big red button at the bottom of the screen to see what would happen! The screen started blinking green and then returned to the previous screen. Well, that was anticlimactic, I thought! No inflight cut-scene, no BOOM! Nothing! What struck me was that after all the usernames and passwords I had used all morning, you would think I would need some authorization to launch a missile in what I thought was a game! Poor game design, I figured!”

At NORAD and worldwide, screens started screaming. People began panicking over the seemingly unprovoked first-strike launch of a multiple-warhead nuclear missile from the Vladivostok peninsula in eastern Russia.

At the Pentagon, line officers began calling their superiors. Within minutes, it is reported, though unconfirmed, the President was relocated to a secure bunker in an undisclosed location conferring with the Joint Chiefs on both an intercept mission and a counter strike with nuclear munitions located in eastern Europe. And, as has been reported, the bunker was slowed in being brought online due to password issues with the secure internal network. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Miley, with a nervous chuckle, recounts the fifteen minutes it took his staff to sign on to the network because a Lt. Commander misspelled “Analytics” three times in a row, forcing him to reset his password using an email link, an authenticator, proving he was not a robot, and identifying all the photos containing peanuts.

In Virginia, Virginia Sims received confirmation from her boss that a nuclear launch had been verified by NORAD and geostationary satellites orbiting in low earth orbit over North Korea. Her mind flashed to a similar situation she had read about in school.

On September 26, 1983, at the height of the Cold War, engineer Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces waited rather than responded when confronted by notification of an intercontinental ballistic missile launch from the United States and four subsequent launches. While awaiting corroborating evidence (which never came) rather than escalating the situation to his superiors, Lt. Col Petrov prevented initiating the world-ending mutually assured destruction doctrine. What turned out to be a false reading of sunlight on high-altitude clouds was mistaken by the new Soviet early warning system as a nuclear attack. Lt. Col Petrov saved the planet that day.

Ms. Sims, with Lt. Col Petrov in the back of her mind, began, essentially, reverse engineering the situation to back beginning. After signing into the NSA internet monitoring system using a handheld token of rotating numbers, verifying she was not a robot, and identifying all the photos of chickens, Ms. Sims quickly traced the IP address to Bob Winston’s insurance company computer in Burke, Virginia.

However, in a twist usually saved for cheesy Hollywood movies, the situation ended as quickly as it began.

“Yeah, I heard the coffee machine in the break room and knew either my boss or my colleague Barbara had arrived for work. It was time for me to get out of the game. At least, I thought it was a game! I clicked the back button on my computer, bringing me back to the screen showing the missile. A popup screen appeared, and I clicked Terminate, which I honestly thought was an overly dramatic way to say End Game. Then a second popup appeared with a space for a password. I have no idea, I thought. I heard my boss’s footsteps approaching me and just entered “password” into the computer. My browser closed just before my boss said good morning. Whew!”

High above the Pacific Ocean, the SS-27 Mod 2 ICBM carrying multiple nuclear warheads detonated in a harmless fireball, splashing pieces into the ocean, witnessed only by sea life and a lone longline trawler.

“It could have been much worse,” said Ms. Sims in a monumental understatement. “Thankfully, Bob entered the right password -“password”!”