Author Michael Dobbs: A Computer Said Attack. One Man Said False Alarm.

The author of THE SIX MINUTE WAR on a radar blip, a night in the Soviet Union and what a machine cannot do. Michael Dobbs is the author of THE SIX MINUTE WAR. He joins Sean Dillon on Beyond the Mic to talk about a line from Reagan’s memoirs, the decisions presidents make under stress, and the question of what a computer cannot do. Dobbs explains where the title comes from. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had thirteen days. Shorter early warning times and better computers shrank that window to a few minutes. He talks about Stanislav Petrov, the officer on duty the night Soviet computers and satellites announced an American missile attack. He also asks whether AI systems will have something in their soul when they face a call like that. Then the Fast Five: his first Russian word, whether he would swim in the ocean again after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, a book he would love to write, a radar blip or a blank page, and who fact-checks him. He says he invented the fact-check column at the Washington Post. One last question closes the conversation. What does he consider a presidential crisis now? Hear the full conversation. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp