"...a book "Walter Slocombe wrote nearly 30 years ago" as well as a contemporaneous "nuclear timeline" examining whether nuclear "launch under attack" was "feasible." Based on discussion that occurred during the MSNBC segment about the steps leading up to the use of nukes, the article focused on the "timeline" of nuclear events based on an anecdote from 1979:
All those steps leave something like eight minutes from the first call to the White House to the last moment at which the president can act. Much of those eight minutes is lost to the task of informing the president. The first call to the White House isn’t to the president, of course. It is to a person designated by the president for this task. (Well, probably the military assistant to that person — another minute ticks off the clock.) In November 1979, that person was Zbigniew Brzezinski — then-President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and father to Mika, who was sitting next to Scarborough, solemnly shaking her head at the idea of Trump with the bomb.
You should really watch Zbig tell the story, though the bottom line is that he recalled having only three minutes to decide whether or not to inform the president,
after which the president had four minutes to decide whether or not to retaliate. At the end of his three minutes, Brzezinski’s military assistant called back to tell him it was a false alarm — someone had left a training tape running. Brzezinski went back to bed. He never woke his wife, by the way. He decided that if it was a Soviet nuclear attack, it was better to let her die in her sleep.
http://www.snopes.com/clinton-four-minute-nuclear/
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