Meet the President’s Main Man
An elegant portrait of Jimmy Carter’s hawkish security adviser reveals him to be a pivotal figure in cold war policy.
At 3am on 3 June 1980, in the last year of the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken by the phone on his bedside table. When he picked up the receiver, he was told the US was under nuclear attack. More than 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from the Soviet Union. Another call followed a minute later. There were in fact more than 2,000 missiles in the air. Brzezinski ordered the US air force to scramble 200 jets. He was about to alert the president to tell him that Armageddon had come, when the phone rang for a third time. It was a false alarm. Someone at Air Defense Command had put a worst-case simulation training video into the wrong computer system, only for it to be projected on the monitoring screens as a real event.
Read More