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How a 1967 Solar Storm Nearly Led To Nuclear War (space.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Space.com: A powerful solar storm nearly heated the Cold War up catastrophically a half century ago, a new study suggests. The U.S. Air Force began preparing for war on May 23, 1967, thinking that the Soviet Union had jammed a set of American surveillance radars. But military space-weather forecasters intervened in time, telling top officials that a powerful sun eruption was to blame, according to the study. "Had it not been for the fact that we had invested very early on in solar and geomagnetic storm observations and forecasting, the impact [of the storm] likely would have been much greater," Delores Knipp, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "This was a lesson learned in how important it is to be prepared." Initially, it was assumed that the Soviet Union was to blame. Since radar jamming is considered an act of war, "commanders quickly began preparing nuclear-weapon-equipped aircraft for launch." Spoiler: Solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) figured out it was a flare that caused the outages, not the Soviets. You can read the abstract of the paper for free here.
"Solar forecasters at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) figured out it was a flare that caused the outages, not the Soviets."
At which point the United States declared war on the Sun and began its long war to liberate space. 'MERICA!
Stories have a way of evolving over time. The cold war was a time of great uncertainty, fear, and distrust. The US and the Soviets were both very uncertain about the technical capabilities of each other. The realities of WWII were still fresh in the minds of many. So when something like this occurred that was not understood, defense mechanisms were kicked into action.
But that does not mean we were ready to push the button or we would have if some scientists hadn't stepped in. It seems that we went through a process of evaluating all of the possibilities, and with the insight of the space program contributors to that process we figured out the cause, and it happened fairly quickly.
I'm sure that over the years some of those scientists liked to tell the story of how they saved the day. And its inevitable that over time the implication of how close we were to pushing the button was enhanced to make the story more interesting. But reality is often a bit more boring and the most likely reality is that we were still early in the process of evaluating the situation and only taking preliminary defensive actions.
Its an interesting story nonetheless, but time has its way of dramatizing things.