A discussion from 1969 about false alarms. The BMEWS radar system produced 40-50 false nuclear attack alerts per year — that's around one per week!pic.twitter.com/OLXga74SXW
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Larry Lynn (NSC staff) to Kissinger, 1 May 1969, giving some talking points to K for talking with news media (Joseph Alsop in particular). Sen. Fulbright and Gore had both recently spoken favorably about LOW and against ABM and talking points were meant to counter both positions.
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Thx! So if those 40-50 false positives are those 10% that are left after addtl data, then there were 4-500 to start with? I agree LOW is a bad idea, but is this cooking the books a little? How could it have been the way the system was designed?!
#dontknowmuchabouthistory -
I don't know if they are talking about the same systems or the same types of errors. My guess is that it's 40-50 false alerts per year and those reduce down to 4-5 after additional data (still a lot!), but I don't have any further details.
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But it could be other way around, too, though +1 false alarm (even if it could be discounted with more data) per day sounds like a lot. (But for a sufficiently complex and large system, not impossible. The radiation screeners at Port Newark have several false positives per day.)
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Maybe it’s the phrase “false alarm” rather than “false positive”— when asteroid trackers say that a track intersects with the earth, they usu mean “I need more data” not that “a planet killer is on its way.” If you know it’s the former you don’t mistrust the system...
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But if you’ve got a few false positives a day from radar and at least one a year from your satellites, you want everyone on the same page!
End of conversation
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