Stanislav Petrov saved your life
Oct. 26th, 2005 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumBy way of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deyo I got details of something I'd heard whispered around various watercoolers.
1983, the movie War Games came out. The movie opened with a test of the crews in missile silos. Many of them were said to have not launched when given what looked to be legitimate orders.
This was a tense time. People still went to sleep at night and wondered if some odd-fluke would cause the Soviets to bomb us. In 1984 the movie "Red Dawn" came out, about an invasion of the Rocky Mountain States by Russian paratroopers, and the subsequent resistance.
We were fighting a proxy war by helping the Mujahadin in Afganistan.
On Sept. 26, 1983 COL Stanislav Petrov was on duty, in a bunker outside of Moscow. His job was to watch the early warning radar, so that, in the event of a U.S. attack, the Russians could implement Mutual Assured Destruction.
He got a warning. A missile was headed for the Soviet Union. He decided the Americans wouldn't send just one missle, so he called it a false alarm.
A little later he got a string of missles on the radar. He decided (with great trepidation) that they too must be false alarms.
He was right.
What, one wonders, would have happened if he'd reported it; even with the caveat that he thought it a false alarm. Tensions were high. This was the time of Reagan. Big buildup of the Army; and deployment of the Pershing 2 SSSM, and howitzers with nuclear shells in Germany. The trident submarine, and a larger Boomer fleet. A president who thought nothing of joking he'd given the order to launch the missles.
Would the officers above him have been willing to roll the dice that this wasn't an attack, because it was only a small handfull of missiles, and they'd still be able to retaliate? No one will ever, Thank God, know.
All because Stanislav Petrov was on duty that night.
We need to celebrate, so I intend to raise a toast, on Sep. 26, in honor of him, with thanksgiving and singing.
deyo I got details of something I'd heard whispered around various watercoolers.1983, the movie War Games came out. The movie opened with a test of the crews in missile silos. Many of them were said to have not launched when given what looked to be legitimate orders.
This was a tense time. People still went to sleep at night and wondered if some odd-fluke would cause the Soviets to bomb us. In 1984 the movie "Red Dawn" came out, about an invasion of the Rocky Mountain States by Russian paratroopers, and the subsequent resistance.
We were fighting a proxy war by helping the Mujahadin in Afganistan.
On Sept. 26, 1983 COL Stanislav Petrov was on duty, in a bunker outside of Moscow. His job was to watch the early warning radar, so that, in the event of a U.S. attack, the Russians could implement Mutual Assured Destruction.
He got a warning. A missile was headed for the Soviet Union. He decided the Americans wouldn't send just one missle, so he called it a false alarm.
A little later he got a string of missles on the radar. He decided (with great trepidation) that they too must be false alarms.
He was right.
What, one wonders, would have happened if he'd reported it; even with the caveat that he thought it a false alarm. Tensions were high. This was the time of Reagan. Big buildup of the Army; and deployment of the Pershing 2 SSSM, and howitzers with nuclear shells in Germany. The trident submarine, and a larger Boomer fleet. A president who thought nothing of joking he'd given the order to launch the missles.
Would the officers above him have been willing to roll the dice that this wasn't an attack, because it was only a small handfull of missiles, and they'd still be able to retaliate? No one will ever, Thank God, know.
All because Stanislav Petrov was on duty that night.
We need to celebrate, so I intend to raise a toast, on Sep. 26, in honor of him, with thanksgiving and singing.
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Date: 2005-10-27 11:40 am (UTC)Reagan was much meligned for star wars, but his advisory team gambled successfully that they could drop the "big one" economically and thus hasten the end of the cold war. It cost the US dear in terms of the budget deficit, but I venture it was a price worth paying in the long run.
We did some interesting analysis of this on ICSC. I'd reccommend Global EWar 2006 as a good read on the development of the staff paper out of the early post cold-war ICSC thinking.