LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. Today, a story about a close call during the Cold War that most people never knew happened. In 1974, 22-year-old Randall Lanning worked deep underground in rural Missouri. He and a commander manned the controls that could launch nuclear missiles in the event of a Soviet attack.
RANDALL LANNING: It was very cramped. It was dimly lit. There was a motor generator under the floor, and there was always the whirring. They did provide you a hot plate for making coffee and stuff. And there was a bed, but you were not allowed to go to sleep. I would be in sweat socks and sweatpants, like something you'd wear to a gym. And most of the time, it was boring, just absolutely boring. No radio. You couldn't even sit down and pop a tape in. But they had a revolving library of magazines from Time and Newsweek to Playboy and Penthhouse.
CRAIG FEISTER: (Laughter).
LANNING: So that night, we were expecting really a very, very quiet shift. And out of the blue, we get this warble tone, an alarm that sounds like there's a message coming in - Tango, Foxtrot, three, Zulu, X-ray. We decode the message, and it was kind of an, oh, dear. Oh, my word. We had practiced this particular message many, many times in the training. To think about, I'm going to end life on this planet as we know it. Am I personally capable of doing this?
I was a young kid. I didn't feel like it would ever come down to the point where I would actually have to launch the missiles for real. So this is big. We were scared - pardon me - [expletive]. So we opened the safe, get the launch keys and the launch code. And then what really made me nervous was inserting the launch key. Then's when you start thinking like, well, am I ever going to see daylight again.
FEISTER: Yeah.
LANNING: You know?
FEISTER: So what happened then?
LANNING: It was probably 10 minutes
FEISTER: Ten minutes.
LANNING: But it seemed like 10 hours.
FEISTER: It seemed all day.
LANNING: And again, another encoded message came through. And thank God, it was a ratchet down. Man, them keys and them documents went flying into that safe, you know?
FEISTER: That was it.
LANNING: It just - get it back in the safe. You know, it was probably my one big war story. But there was no news report, and most Americans never even knew it happened.
FEISTER: So how did that impact your life?
LANNING: Why do you think that after 51 years, this story is so vivid in my mind? Had we launched, my mom and dad, who live in Omaha, Nebraska, would've gone to bed that night and never woken up. I mean, you're talking about Armageddon. You know, if I was sitting in that silo at age 74, what I am now, I'm not sure what I'd do. When you're younger, you don't think about, what are the big implications? You're training for something you think will probably never happen. And I hope it never does.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: Colonel Randall Lanning with his friend, Craig Feister. Lanning never knew exactly what happened that night, but the incident suggests the Soviet Union may have been gauging U.S. response time to an imminent threat. This interview is archived at the Library of Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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