– But the committee knows about it, right?

– Makes sense, but I don't know exactly.

– Who's on the committee?

– More on that later. It's a separate clearance. The Committee is no less complex than an autonomous control and command system. Some of the information there is anonymized.

– How's that?

– If you are admitted and happen to be present at the gathering, you will be very surprised. In the meantime, listen up. This is a complex expert system, equipped with multiple communication systems and sensors that monitor the combat situation. This system monitors the presence and intensity of conversations on the air on military frequencies, the receipt of telemetry signals from the posts, the level of radiation on the surface and in the vicinity, the regular occurrence of point sources of powerful ionizing and electromagnetic radiation at key coordinates, coinciding with the sources of short-term seismic disturbances in the Earth's crust, which corresponds to the pattern of multiple ground nuclear strikes, the presence of live people at the command post. Based on the correlation of these factors, the system makes a final decision on the need for a retaliatory strike. There is another variant of the system's operation. Upon receiving information about the first signs of a missile attack, the Commander-in-Chief puts the system into combat mode. After that, if within a certain time the command center of the system does not receive a signal to stop the combat algorithm, command missiles are launched. This is where the interesting part comes in. What is the combat mode?

– How's that?

– Here we go. At first, we did everything by the book. Every four hours, the codes change. The system resets the download and starts over. It's monitored by all the understudies and someone else! If any of the posts on schedule duty miss even a minute, an alarm goes off, and the codes are changed by one of the understudies, and the one who missed is classified. That is, nothing else is known about him. The most interesting thing is that in order to test the system, maintenance was once conducted under the new instructions. An emergency occurred during the maintenance. According to the instructions, the Cheget and Kazbek systems were switched off and they were de-energized. The commands came from the post of the object "Zero", that is, from us, or rather – from me, to whom all understudies are subordinated. Everything went smoothly, without fail, but after the moment of code change, which had not been changed, because the tests were in progress and the time of change was shifted, the system suddenly gave a command to the combat mode.

– Was it supposed to be different?

– You see, the autonomous control and command system was de-energized, we didn't enter a command, the system had nowhere to get an order.

– So what?

– Everyone's in shock. What do we do? Confirmation signals are coming in from all stations. The commander-in-chief is on the line: "What's the matter?" Submarines, missile sites are requesting confirmation or cancelation! My hair is standing on end! No one was really in such a situation. Although the launch training was going on in such a way that everyone was so sure of himself that he would have made a decision without hesitation. Everything was mixed up in my head. What if there was a malfunction, a mistake, a test, a drill? Time is running into seconds. I give the command to urgently shut down the phase and enter new codes. The thing is, the whole system was under routine maintenance. The decision was made at the top, that is, at the bottom. You know what I mean. There was no one to argue with.