A car raced from command center and managed to signal the aircraft to stop. When things had settled down it was found that the original intruder had been a bear, not a saboteur. Once again, good and quick thinking by the military officer in charge prevented a possible disaster. The Soviet Government was threatening to fire rockets at London and Paris. A flight of swans over Turkey had been misidentified as aircraft.
Computers can play dreadful tricks, and can fail at the most inconvenient moments.
There were many computers in the nuclear weapons system from the earliest days of computers when failures were common. The two following examples fortunately did not happen at any very bad moment. At the main Command Centers the warning displays were two windows that showed the number of missiles, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles respectively, that were currently in view by the early warning radar. Normally each window showed a string of four zeros. Preparations for retaliation were instituted, including nuclear bomber crews starting their engines, actual launch of Pacific Command's Airborne Command Post, and the concrete covers of Minuteman missile silos rolled back.