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| 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.
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| 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.
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| A Nagasaki child |
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| Humans melted together at Hiroshima |
