The Men Who Saved The World - Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov without whose courage and quick thinking our world might be long gone.

Today we remember the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945. With Japan continuing to resist the US forces in the Pacific after the earlier bombing of Hiroshima, the Allies concluded that a second atomic attack was required to force a surrender, which duly took place on 15 August.

By 1949, both the West and the Soviet bloc had acquired nuclear weapons and the Cold War had begun in earnest. Over the years that followed, massive nuclear arsenals were built up on both sides with the capacity to destroy the earth several times over. Initially, these were to be carried on bomber planes, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as time went by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of thousands of miles of flight became the preferred delivery method. These were held in underground silos, on submarines and on mobile truck launchers. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) held that because both sides could destroy each other, nuclear weapons would never be used. In this way, an awful "peace" could be established - except as noted in an earlier blog, the actual result was a long series of devastatingly violent and bloody proxy wars.

Yet quite aside from the appalling "Balance of Terror" and dreadful waste of resources required by MAD, the doctrine itself did not remain static. By the early 1980s, under the Reagan Presidency, American political leaders such as Henry Kissinger were openly talking about the feasibility of "limited" nuclear war where smaller nuclear devices could be deployed for use on European battlefields but somehow contained from developing into global conflagration. Similarly, some publically postulated more than a little enthusiatically about a first strike on the Soviet Union, which would involve firing US missiles at the sites of Soviet ones, "knocking out" the Russians before they could respond.

Into this mix came increasingly sophisticated computerisation. Both sides relied on not always particularly reliable early warning systems to detect attacks by each other. With the short time and high stakes involved, Command and Control required almost instantaneous human decisions on how to respond to data, decisions that could determine the very survival of life on Earth.

The possible consequences were powerfully depicted in 1980s popular culture in films like Wargames and the song 99 Balloons, but were officially dismissed as the biased ramblings of peace activists or the sensationalist fiction of pulp novelists. Yet the supposed fiction could not have been much closer to the truth.

On 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov was on duty as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Soviet Defence Forces at a bunker near Moscow. His role was to identify any alerts on the Early Warning System, decide if they were real and report them to his superiors, who would have barely more than three or four minutes to decide whether to respond with a counter-attack. Following the Soviets' shooting down of a South Korean passenger jet that had entered their airspace a couple of weeks earlier, leading to the deaths of scores of American passengers, tension was high between Andropov's Soviet Government and the Reagan White House.

Just after midnight, the system identified a single US Minuteman nuclear missile being fired at the Soviet Union. Petrov concluded that this was a computer error, judging that an American first strike would be likely to involve large numbers of missiles. Shortly after, however, the system identified a further four Minutemen being launched against the Soviets. Again, Petrov concluded, correctly, that this was a further false alarm. The cause of the computer error was later identified as sunlight hitting high altitude clouds. Given the split second decision-making required and the international situation, had he made a different call, most commentators, including one of his superior officers, have subsequently judged that Andropov would almost certainly have called for a full counter-strike, plunging the world into the nuclear abyss because of a glitch in the computer system.

Stanislav Petrov interviewed recently

The incident was kept secret until after the end of the Cold War. In the bureaucracy that was the Soviet Union, Petrov was praised by his superiors for his prompt thinking, but disciplined for not properly completing his paperwork about the incident. He remains today a largely unknown and unsung hero (although he has been the subject of a documentary film and has received several peace awards).

The 1983 incident was not the only one of this nature - in 1962, when American ships began to drop depth charges on a Soviet submarine in international waters during the Cuban Missile crisis, the Political Officer and the Captain, out of contact with Moscow for several days, feared war had begun and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at their attackers. The Deputy Captain, Vasili Arkhipov, voted against doing so and as Soviet military regulations required unanimous agreement between the three of them, the strike did not proceed. Instead, with oxygen getting low, they surfaced among the American ships and headed home.

There have been other accidental occurrences, such as American bombers crashing and almost detonating their nuclear payload, while the NATO Able Archer military manoeuvres in November 1983, just weeks after the Petrov incident, were so realistic that the Soviet Politburo put Warsaw Pact forces on high alert, fearing an imminent invasion. In 1979, the American NORAD early warning system registered a full Soviet strike on the USA as being underway. A US senator present at NORAD at the time described scenes of total panic as operatives prepared a counter-strike, fortunately realising at the very last moment that what they were seeing was actually an accidental repeat of a test scenario run by their own side.

The last known incident was as late as 1995, when by then Russian as opposed to Soviet radar systems mistook a Norwegian/US rocket test as a possible attack. Perhaps most terrifyingly of all, the semi-inebriated President Boris Yeltsin was handed the codes required to decide on a nuclear attack on the West. Fortunately, the trajectory of the missile was soon seen to be heading away from Russian airspace.

So just as the fingers on the trigger of our survival have been those of a few men, we would have been long gone now was it not for the prompt thinking and courage of two Soviet officers. At other times, it seems we have been fortunate that computer errors became evident just in time to stop people who were automatically rushing to follow predetermined instructions to wipe us from existence and irradiate our planet for aeons to come.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are so far the only times atomic weapons have been used in war, although there have been many test explosions as well. With the West seemingly set on confrontation with the Russians over Ukraine, there is more than a little enthusiasm among some of our would-be Napoleons for a return to the Cold War. With our ever greater reliance on computerisation to run our military, with even autonomous decision making robots in development by both the USA and UK, they may want to stop and consider the terrifying future they are offering.

Meantime, as we remember the dead of 1945, let's also remember Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, the men who saved the world. For now.

A Nagasaki child

Humans melted together at Hiroshima

Destroyer of Worlds - Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We commemorate today the dropping of the atomic bomb, code-named Little Boy, by the US Air Force on the Japanese city of Hiroshima seventy years ago. Along with one dropped on Nagasaki a few days later, it killed tens of thousands of people, left many more with severe burns, radiation sickness and later generations with genetic illnesses. It heralded the beginning of a new nuclear age where once the USSR had also acquired these weapons, a balance of terror appropriately termed Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) existed for over four and a half decades between the world's two main superpowers.

It is difficult to judge from this distance in history about the motives and reasons of 1945: Nazi Germany was working hard to create an atomic bomb and so it followed the Allies did the same. At the time, because of its hitherto unimagined power, many thought it would make war obsolete because of the consequences of a nuclear exchange. Even Gandhi initially welcomed it for this perceived reason, but its actual use in 1945 was enough in itself to cause Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, to question what had been done.

And indeed any thoughts of benefit were soon to be disavowed: the weapons became bigger and ever more powerful to the tens and hundreds of times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, but the wars continued and grew worse. In Korea, in Malaysia, in Vietnam and the Middle East and then all across the southern hemisphere as proxy armies for the USA and USSR battled over the corpses of millions. There was no direct confrontation, but the military in the USA began to develop the ludicrous concept of limited or tactical nuclear war and the line between conventional and nuclear weapons became blurred. Both the UK and USA, for example, used depleted uranium tipped missiles in Serbia in the 1990s and in Iraq in 2003 and subsequently. DU is a by-product of the enrichment process used to make nuclear weapons.

The consequences for the local population have been insidiously devastating - birth defects in Iraq have rocketed since the 2003 invasion with the most obvious reason being the prevalence of DU-related radiation from munitions used in urban zones. The rate of genetic defects and mutations, as well as related illnesses such as cancer, is considerably worse in parts of Iraq now than thosd measured in post-1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (More information HERE; caution contains extremely graphic and upsetting images)

"Highly stimulating" -  Dr Strangelove satirised the atomic fetish

The fetishistic attachment of some political leaders to nuclear missiles has been satirised many times over, perhaps most powerfully by Peter Sellars in Dr Strangelove, but it is a case where real life has at times been too extreme to be believable.

This last few weeks, we have seen a potential breakthrough in limiting the spread of these awful weapons. Although it is questionable whether Iran has been planning on building its own nuclear bomb, an outline agreement with the international community paves the way to halt any such possibility. The US Congress Republicans have been indicating hostility to the agreement, but as President Obama has observed, rejecting it would leave them with the sole option of fighting yet another war in the Middle East.

Iran, centre, & where nuclear bombs are in the Middle East

There are now more nuclear weapons states than ever - Iran is surrounded by them, with Israel holding the largest arsenal in the Middle East and steadfastly refusing to let anyone from the UN inspect it. India and Pakistan have atomic bombs and Saudi Arabia almost certainly has the capacity to create one. Only South Africa and some of the former Soviet states have ever renounced their nuclear weapons, while the British political establishment is hell-bent on renewing our Trident nuclear system at huge cost - as much as £100 billions even although the global scene is now so changed from when it was originally acquired.

There is enough weaponry on the planet to eradicate all life five or six times over within a few hours. In order to carry on living, we may put this fact to the back of our minds, but the awful truth is that by this time tomorrow, we could be extinct along with every other living thing. Indeed, in 1983, technical accident almost led to an all-out holocaust had it not been for the prompt and courageous thinking of a sole Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, who realised just in time what was happening.

So the real remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not simply be to solemnly remember the dead. It must also be to determine now more than ever that the greatest testament to those who perished would be if humanity does indeed work to renounce and remove these planet-killing weapons once and for all.