NARRATOR: In 1995, when most Americans thought the nuclear nightmare was over, we came close to a nuclear exchange with Russia. And it all happened entirely by accident.

The near catastrophe started innocently enough: Russia's early warning system mistook a US/Norwegian research rocket for a missile attack from one of America's nuclear submarines off the coast of Norway.

Russians, for reasons unknown, had never received Norway's notification of the launch. As the four-stage rocket began its ascent, it looked on Russian radar as if it were turning towards Russia.

As the upper stages of the rocket broke apart, the Russian radar operators concluded that the several blips were the multiple warheads of an incoming ballistic missile.

President Boris Yeltsin was informed that a nuclear missile was speeding towards the heart of Russia. Russian nuclear forces, already on a hair-trigger alert, were put on even higher alert, ready to launch at his command.

The fate of the planet hung in the balance as hundreds of millions of people were going about their daily lives.

Russian policy called for a "launch on warning." "Use them or loose them."

Yeltsin wisely waited. And within those fateful moments, the Russians were able to declare a false alarm. An unimaginable nuclear disaster had barely been avoided.

This illustrates the grave danger that confronts humanity today: launch of a nuclear missile by accident or miscalculation. According to experts, it is a danger that has increased since 1995 with the further deterioration of the Russian political situation.

Amy Lesser, On-line Director for the Center for Environmental Citizenship, works with young people in order to raise awareness of environmental issues.

LESSER: When I learned about the accident, or the almost accident in 1995, I was absolutely terrified. I had no idea that situations like this existed. It wasn't exactly surprising, since I'm fairly aware of the disintegration of the Russian infrastructure and government, etcetera, and I have been generally worried about whose hands our nuclear, the Russian nuclear weapons fall into. But I had no idea that it had actually escalated to the point where we almost had a nuclear disaster in this country.

NARRATOR: Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, describes the perilous circumstances that exist today.

TURNER: The danger is, first of all, mistakes, miscalculations, that they misinterpret something that's going on somewhere and they deliberately launch a nuclear weapon or several.

The second is they loose control of themselves, the whole system is breaking down. I mean, Russia is disintegrating. It's entirely possible that these weapons will now be under the control of the provincial governors, not the central government.

A third problem is accidents. When you have weapons of this magnitude that are deteriorating, they can deteriorate to the point where they launch accidentally.

NARRATOR: Because of the overall decline of Russian conventional military forces, Russia's war planners now rely more heavily on their nuclear arsenal to deter aggression. But that arsenal and especially its warning systems, are in a sorry state. Russia's feeling of military inferiority - heightened by the expansion of NATO and the war against Yugoslavia, Russia's ally - has caused them to set their nuclear deterrent on a very short fuse.

NARRATOR: Today, nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia is more likely to occur by accident or miscalculation than by a deliberate decision. The danger is not unique to Russia:

In November 1979, duty officers at four separate U.S. command centers reported seeing a full-scale missile attack against the United States.

TURNER: President Carter's national security advisor was awakened one night at 3 o'clock in the morning and told there were several thousand missiles coming at us across the Pacific Ocean. It turned out it was a total mistake.

NARRATOR: The false alarm was the result of a training tape being run as a demonstration for a United States senator and being mistaken for an actual missile attack.

NARRATOR: Dr. Bruce Blair, a former missile control officer in the Air Force, is now a leading authority on the dangers of accidental nuclear war.

BLAIR: Russia and the United States still operate their missile forces as though the Cold War never ended, and as though we may have to fire at them at any moment, en masse.

LESSER: I see no reason now that the Cold War is over that we should continue to have our nuclear weapons on alert status. There should be some benefit to ending the Cold War, and that benefit should be increased safety for everyone.

NARRATOR: Despite the dangerous decline of Russia's early warning system, the United States persists in a "first use" doctrine dating back to the attack on Hiroshima in World War II. Our stated willingness to use nuclear weapons "first" rather than exclusively for retaliation increases the danger of an accidental missile launch. In this time of heightened tensions between the two nuclear powers, traditional efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals on both sides are no longer sufficient to prevent an inadvertent nuclear launch.

BLAIR: The current path of nuclear arms control doesn't address the problem of a failure of control over nuclear weapons. It only addresses the size of the arsenal. So the idea is to extend the time is takes to launch nuclear forces, particularly missiles, from the current period of a few minutes, to a period of hours, days, weeks, months, eventually even years.

NARRATOR: De-alerting would immediately address the danger posed by Russia's increasingly unstable nuclear weapons complex, as well as the United States "launch on warning" strategy.

Making sure that neither the U.S. nor Russia would try to gain military advantage by cheating on a de-alerting program is an important issue that Dr. Blair believes can be easily worked out.

BLAIR: Some of the verification means are very simple: looking down from space by satellite, counting the number of submarines in port. Others are more technically sophisticated.

NARRATOR: Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, is an expert on arms control and related technical issues. He believes de-alerting is a workable solution to the danger of an accidental launch.

MAKHIJANI: The only thing today that can physically devastate the United Stated is the Russian nuclear arsenal. It is very huge, and it can destroy this country. At the same time, the Russians aren't going to take the leadership, because they don't have conventional military capability.