On January 25, 1995, a radar station in Murmansk detected what appeared to be a Trident missile heading into Russian airspace. It was actually a rocket carrying scientific equipment. Russian authorities had been notified of the impending launch, but none of them had passed word along to the radar technicians — or to Boris Yeltsin, who was given ten minutes to decide whether to launch a counterstrike. Yeltsin decided against it. Why would Bill Clinton have decided to nuke us? It must be a mistake. This is the kind of leeway you get when your leader isn't a saber-rattling prick. Imagine if this incident had happened in 1985 rather than 1995. Do Konstantin Chernenko's handlers give the same benefit of the doubt to the man who a few months earlier had jokingly announced that he'd just launched a first-strike against the USSR?
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