A while back I made a video about "broken arrow" incidents. Those are accidents involving
nuclear weapons that do not create a risk of nuclear war; like nukes just accidentally
falling out of the bomb bay and being lost at the bottom of the sea, or being involved
in mid-air plane collisions. In that video I mispronounce nuclear as "nucular" numerous
times and call the state of Maryland "Mary Land" - in other words, it's a classic Qxir
video. Well, in that video I mention that there have
also been incidents involving nuclear systems that do create a risk of nuclear war. There's
been a few of them, unsettlingly, and you've probably never even heard of a couple of incidents
- despite the world-threatening stakes. Yes, we live in a timeline where humans have apparently
decided not to annihilate the planet completely with nuclear weapons, opting instead to destroy
it with alternative options - but there have been times when we've come very, very, very,
like worryingly close, to that not being the case.
Today we'll be looking at one such time, when a nuclear system malfunction nearly led to
the dooming of mankind, but we were all saved by the intelligence of a single man. Now there's
a scary idea.
Stanislav Petrov was born in 1939 in Soviet Russia - and that is the most Communist sentence
ever said by man. He attended the Kiev Higher Engineering Radio-Technical College and after
graduating in 1972 he joined the Soviet Air Defence Forces.
In 1983, he was a lieutenant colonel and the officer on duty in a bunker near Moscow. This
duty involved monitoring the command center for the Soviet early warning network for potential
nuclear strikes against Russia. For context, this was during the Cold War,
when mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were threatening
to escalate to nuclear warfare. The thing about nuclear weapons is, they were a game
changer for war. If you had nuclear capability, you basically had the power to win a war in
an instant. The problem was, it wasn't long before everyone else start getting their grubby
little hands on them too. So then of course you need to have more nukes
than they do, and then you gotta install them in their neighboring countries, and then you
gotta put them on submarines, and intercontinental missiles, and eventually, where once you had
all the power, now no one has any power. Why? Because there are so many nukes on the playing
field, if any single nation were to use theirs, there'd be retaliation, and then everyone
would join in and then the whole world gets destroyed - it's called mutually assured destruction
- we had created weapons so powerful in quantities so great that we couldn't use them, or we'd
all perish. At this point perhaps any other species of
intelligent life would look around and realise the depths of their warmongering depravity,
put away their weapons for good and join their former enemies in pledged stewardship of the
planet, but humans being humans, we decided the only solution to the threat of mutually
assured destruction, was the development of first-strike capability - the ability to launch
an overwhelming nuclear strike so quickly that the enemy is totally and completely destroyed
before they have the chance to launch a successful counter-attack.
So not only is it important that your missiles are powerful, fast, plentiful and well-placed,
but your detection systems better'd be too -elsewise your adversary could have first-strike
capability over you, and then he might realise the best thing would be to use it while he
still has it, as your very existence poses the threat of his destruction.
This is the state the US and Soviet Union were in in 1983. Both sides were under the
belief that the other side would be the first to launch the nukes - and even though neither
side actually wanted to use them, well fuck, if you think the enemy is going to do it first,
maybe you have no choice... It was a state of total paranoia, and as the arms race progressed,
it only got worse. By 1983, it seemed total destruction could be a button press away at
any moment.
Imagine then, Stanislav Petrov's shock, when in the early hours of the morning of the 26th
September 1983, a siren went off and the computer alerted there was a missile headed for Russia.
Followed by another, then another, then another, then another. Five intercontinental missiles
were on their way. Petrov was frozen with terror, and understandably
so, this machine was alerting him that in just a few minutes, a violent end was about
to be wrought upon the world, and he lived there!
His official instructions? To immediately report a nuclear strike to the top brass,
who would then have just minutes to scramble a counter-offensive, at least ensuring that
their attacker would also be destroyed. That's right, they couldn't do anything to save themselves,
just make sure they took the enemy down with them. Mutually assured destruction.
So what did Petrov do then? He ignored his instructions and reported the alert as a false
alarm. He just had a feeling that something wasn't right. And he was right - it wasn't
right! Actually the satellite had picked up sunlight
on high-altitude clouds as missiles. There was no nukes at all, it was just clouds! Yet,
had Petrov reported the alert as his commands ordered him, his superiors could have decided
to initiate the counter-attack, and launch nukes against the US. Then the US would have
seen the Soviet nukes, and actually fired missiles, and then they'd both be destroyed.
A little bit like the song 99 Red Balloons, where the narrator releases a bunch of balloons
that are mistakenly picked up by nuclear detection systems and instigate a nuclear war that destroys
the world. That song came out the very same year as this event actually, although at the
time no one knew about it. And the narrative is a little different in the original German
release, Neunundneunzig Luftballoons, with which you may be more familiar, depending
on where you're from. Back on topic.
So how did Stanislav Petrov know the alerts were false alarms? Well, he didn't. He was
kinda just guessing. He knew if the US were to launch a strike on Russia, it would be
with a force intended to immediately overwhelm them, and that takes more than five measly
missiles. He also didn't really trust the computer systems, they were relatively new
and the speed at which they seemed to be processing the verification checks on the missiles seemed
suspiciously fast. Petrov had a civilian education in IT, which
made him unique on his team, his colleagues were all professional soldiers, and he believed
they would have been a lot more trusting of the system. He believed that had the same
thing occurred on anyone else's shift, it would have been reported as a nuclear attack.
Despite potentially saving the world, Petrov said he was neither punished nor rewarded
for his actions after they came under investigation. The whole event was kept quite until after
the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90's when a General involved in the incident went
public with it. So nobody knew this had even happened until a decade later, keep that in
mind. The world's population was going about their daily life completely unaware that in
a bunker somewhere a man was deciding whether or not to report a nuclear strike. Really
consider the power of unseen forces in your life and enjoy your existential dread.
Stanislav Petrov retired early from the military and in later years suffered a nervous breakdown.
Thankfully, his actions were finally acknowledged when they were made public, and he received
worldwide praise. He was honoured with awards and commendations, including 2 World Citizen
Awards in 2004. Sadly, Stanislav Petrov died on 19 May 2017 of pneumonia.
A tale of the planetary annihilation that almost came to pass, and the man who made
sure it didn't. Have you heard this story before? Seems like a pretty important one
to be ignorant of right? Just think, there could be a man in a bunker right now who's
about to make the wrong choice. Well, probably not, the threat of nuclear war is not quite
so present as it was back then and I'd guess the systems and protocols surrounding this
stuff is more advanced now. But, there is a man in a bunker right now
-- well not a bunker, more of a hovel really. And, completely out of your perception, he
works tirelessly to make YouTube video -- it's me, I'm talking about myself. This analog
kind of fell apart, due to shoddy worksmanship, so I'll just say I unleash one of these videos
on the world every week and if you don't want to live in fear of not knowing what I'm up
to, you should subscribe. Thanks.