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'I Was Just Doing My Job': Soviet Officer Who Averted Nuclear War Dies at Age 77
A Soviet officer who prevented a nuclear crisis between the US and the USSR and possible World War III in the 1980s has quietly passed away. He was 77. In 2010 RT spoke to Stanislav Petrov, who never considered himself a hero. We look at the life of the man who saved the world.
A decision that Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov once took went down in history as one that stopped the Cold War from turning into nuclear Armageddon, largely thanks to Karl Schumacher, a political activist from Germany who helped the news of his heroism first reach a western audience nearly two decades ago.
On September 7, Schumacher, who kept in touch with Petrov in the intervening years, phoned him to wish him a happy birthday, but instead learned from Petrov's son, Dmitry, that the retired officer had died on May 19 in his home in a small town near Moscow.
On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was on duty in charge of an early warning radar system in a bunker near Moscow, when just past midnight he saw the radar screen showing a single missile inbound from the United States and headed toward the Soviet Union.
"When I first saw the alert message, I got up from my chair. All my subordinates were confused, so I started shouting orders at them to avoid panic. I knew my decision would have a lot of consequences," Petrov recalled of that fateful night in an interview with RT in 2010.
...
It was later revealed that what the Soviet satellites took for missiles launch was sunlight reflected from clouds.
Many of us feel that one person can't make a real difference in the world. Stanislov Petrov did.
R.I.P. Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world
The Guardian and other news sources report, that Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov has died, age 77.
Petrov has become (not very) famous, because in 1983 his quick decision making averted a possible nuclear war.
I think that we, humans, are bad at recognizing significant events that led to everything continuing as normal..
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:36PM (13 children)
During the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet submariner Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov [wikipedia.org] cast the sole vote against launching a nuclear torpedo. The captain and the political officer wanted to launch.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:49AM (12 children)
There's been roughly 20 or so close calls. I suspect we are here from a kind of Anthropic Principle perspective rather than "luck": dead civilizations aren't around to ponder what went wrong any more than people write books about why they lost Russian Roulette. The total number of close-call-ponderers will be far greater where war was coincidentally averted. We are not "lucky" in the usual sense, rather we (our planet) are just the survivors of the dice rolls.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:18AM (6 children)
Similar: we're in one of countless parallel universes; in ours, things went along so that we'd survive this long, whereas in other universes, different things happened or decisions were made, and nuclear war was the result. It's quite possible that we'll still encounter nuclear war, while another parallel universe which is identical to ours currently makes a different decision at that point, and that one survives while we destroy ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:34AM
I read GP as implicitly invoking Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, but you're correct that the same principle can apply to other parallel universe schemes.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:36AM
Actually, I think your reading was correct. If it weren't for the "(our planet)" part, I wouldn't.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:48PM (3 children)
That was basically what they did in the Stargate series--every time the (TV) viewer sees an alternate reality, it's always worse off than the primary one. Which I thought was a nice lampshade hanging on the whole bit where you're 6 seasons in and only one of the main characters has died (he gets better).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:13PM (2 children)
Yep, and this reminds me of my theory about Star Trek: the reason the Star Trek shows we have seem so unrealistic is because they're not set in our universe. They're set in a parallel universe where humans are generally benevolent and competent. We're actually living in the "mirror universe", or one like it, where humans are generally evil, and only got as far as they did because of accidents of history.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:59PM (1 child)
Depressing but pretty plausible :-/
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:53PM
Yep. I highly recommend watching the Enterprise season 4 two-parter, "In a Mirror, Darkly". The first episode shows how First Contact with the Vulcans goes in our universe: the Vulcans land, show their hand-sign for peace, and Zephram Cochrane pulls out a shotgun and shoots them, then the humans kill the rest and raid the ship. That's us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:05AM (4 children)
20 lucky dice rolls doesn't happen often.
More likely is that time and time again, calmer heads prevailed due to an understanding of the implications and systems were put into place to make it somewhat difficult to trigger mutually assured destruction.
Now the Cold War is over and it doesn't seem likely that any of the big nuke powers will initiate a first strike. If North Korea launched a nuclear strike, which goes against its national self interests and ideology, it could be leveled with conventional explosives without any wider nuclear conflict. For all we know, the U.S. and China could have a secret agreement to not go to war over U.S. retaliation against North Korea.
Even if megaton nukes were launched all over the place, that is not necessarily a civilization or species ender. Many countries could come out relatively unscathed. People in bunkers could live on.
Finally, the damage caused by nuclear weapons may be highly overrated [nextbigfuture.com]:
"Grey goo" [wikipedia.org] may be a more effective alien civilization killer than nuclear weapons. Our civilization has the capability to put a small colony on Mars within just a couple of decades, with the possibility of fuel manufacturing there and an eventual return to repopulate Earth if necessary. I'm not going to accept "they killed each other" explanations for the Fermi paradox until we start finding alien ruins, spying nuclear fallout in exoplanet atmospheres, or something else along those lines.
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(Score: 2, Redundant) by bob_super on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:06AM (2 children)
Considering the current inhabitant of the White House, anything that minimizes the post-nuclear-war doom forecast is quite irresponsible.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:31AM
From what I hear, "they" are keeping a high-level defense official near Pres. Trump at all times to keep him from doing anything rash. And from what we know of Trump, he is easily influenced by people who are nice to him (insert your own terminology here) or that he has some respect for (especially military generals).
Trump is hardest to control when he gets free reign of a mic. And the damage he can do with words is somewhat limited. He also does not like to deal with absolutes, which could be either a good or bad thing when he is talking about North Korea, NATO, etc.
Leadership can't change the facts. The threat of nuclear war is devastating, but highly overrated [oism.org] due to decades of fearmongering, propaganda, bad science, and pop culture. If we are talking about the Fermi paradox, we need all the facts about Earth's doom forecast that we have available to fill in for our massive gaps in observing the sky (alien broadcasts could be plain missed or too weak to pick up) and exoplanets (we know of just a few thousand of the trillions of likely planet-like objects in our galaxy, and don't yet have the capability to detect evidence of exoplanet biospheres).
4-8 years is a small amount of time and might be a good practice run for the dangerous weirdness of the near future. We have to last at least a few more decades in order to develop into a rudimentary multi-planet species. Get used to the Trump situation because there could be far more existential dangers down the line.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:58AM
I've been hearing reports on the radio through the day on his UN speech.
He overtly threatened to murder 25 million people.
There was complete silence in the room.
(I'm shocked that no one booed. I know I would have.)
I have previously mentioned that Trump reminds me of the psychopath politician in "The Dead Zone".
I'm not the only one to make the connection. [google.com]
After this, I'm expecting more folks to connect those dots.
...and as FatPhil notes below, "saved" may be too optimistic a word for the next 3 years and 4 months.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:27PM
I'm not going to accept "they killed each other" explanations for the Fermi paradox until we start finding alien ruins, spying nuclear fallout in exoplanet atmospheres, or something else along those lines.
IANAAP (astrophysicist), but I think you're expecting too much here. Surely a civilization could destroy themselves in nuclear warfare without us seeing the nuclear fallout: the fallout is of course extremely hard to detect from this distance (we can barely even detect Earth-size planets still), there doesn't really need to be *that* much of it to reduce their civilization back to pre-industrial levels (i.e., they don't have to completely destroy themselves, they just have to screw up their civilization enough so that they can't achieve significant spaceflight), and even if they completely destroy themselves, the nuclear event will last a relatively short amount of time, so the likelihood that we'll see the fallout is very low, and instead we're more likely to see worlds that had a war eons in the past, and now they're either lifeless or they have some life but not any intelligent life. Finding alien ruins is the only really reliable way IMO to figure out the Fermi Paradox, but we're not going to find any ruins until we actually start exploring exoplanets, and we're nowhere near achieving that; we have 2 probes launched 40 years ago that have just barely gotten out of the Solar System, and it'll take 40,000 years for them to get to another star system. If we want to explore other systems, we need a level of propulsion and communications and automation technology beyond what we have now, but there are some interesting [wikipedia.org] ideas [wikipedia.org] that have been proposed that might be doable in the next few decades if we really wanted to.