Be Like Vasili: personal reflections 30 years after the Fall of the Wall

I nearly died before I was born. I have a man I never met to thank for my life - and so do you.

It can be difficult to remember sometimes how the world has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, thirty years ago today. It is almost easy to forget what was a fixed world with rigidly set boundaries between the Communist East and capitalist West held in a perpetual state of uneasy tension by literally thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other under the appallingly apt doctrine of M.A.D. - mutually assured destruction.

The Man Who Saved The World

My Mum was pregnant with me during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, fourteen days when the world teetered on the edge of Armageddon as Kennedy and Khrushchev eyeballed each other over the Mexican Gulf. Although they eventually blinked and found a diplomatic solution, we now know that atomic war was only avoided by the personal action of Vasili Arkhipov, a Deputy Commander of a Soviet submarine that was caught in the blockade of Cuba by the US Navy.

After several days out of radio contact with Moscow, his commander and the Political Officer concluded that nuclear war had begun and wanted to fire an  atomic warhead at the American ships. A unanimous decision was required between the three of them and after a long and heated argument with his superiors, Arkhipov courageously vetoed the attack. Had he not done so, it is unlikely that I would be alive to be writing this now, and nor would you or anyone else be around to read it.

The world is probably in many ways more dangerous now that during the Cold War - but perhaps the sense of an underpinning threat of potentially imminent existential destruction that was always in the background before 1989 has at least abated. I can't quite recall when I first became aware of atomic weapons, but growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, our culture was soaked in the propaganda of the Cold War. It might seem hard to believe, but for our "Boomer" generation "Europe" stopped at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and behind the Wall and indeed the whole "Iron Curtain" lay a mysterious, closed Soviet hinterland of untold threat and misery.

Aside from the news and political line that we could be overwhelmed in days by the gigantic muscle of the Red Army or alternatively wiped out within a couple of hours in a nuclear exchange, much popular culture was founded on the Soviet Menace. Whether on the cinema screen in films like "From Russia With Love" or the publications from shadowy right-wing employers groups like the mid-70's Aims of Industry's "Reds Under The Bed" attempt to smear socialist trade unions with treason, we were to accept the need for eternal vigilance in the form of Poseidon nuclear submarines patrolling the seas from their Scottish base and American Cruise missiles deployed in the heart of England.

Bizarre booklets like 1980's "Protect and Survive" informed householders how to survive the radioactive holocaust by unscrewing an interior door, laying it length-ways against your lounge wall and then sitting behind it for two weeks with some cartons of water and boxes of biscuits. The equivalent of tens of billions of pounds poured into subterranean bunkers. There, national and local government officials and the bizarre volunteer force of the Royal Observer Corps - folk who spent their evenings and weekends watching for war - would monitor the nuclear exchange and subsequent fallout above their heads and then hilariously "re-establish normal service".

There were of course plenty of parodies of this mix of cynical propaganda and wild naivete - from the early 1960s classic "Dr Strangelove" through to the 1980s "Whoops Apocalypse" and the nauseatingly haunting "Threads". Raymond Briggs' powerful picture book "When The Wind Blows" devastatingly recounted the tragically unquestioning faith of an elderly couple in the authorities' promises of their ability to survive the end of the world. In music, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's No.1 "Two Tribes" satirised the government emergency broadcast to provide advice on disposing of your dead grandmother outside your fallout shelter.

The dark humour was pervasive, but so too was the sense that, one day, any day, it would all go so quickly and badly wrong for us.

People protested of course - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched from the 1950s onwards and women's peace camps appeared most memorably outside Greenham Common airbase, and at a number of other military sites too. Spied on by the authorities and dismissed as troublemakers and traitors, the zeitgeist was that it was only institutions like NATO that stood between us and the plans of conquest of the Soviet Empire. And of course for freedom loving peoples, the obliteration of the planet was infinitely preferable to living under Communism.

The Soviet Empire was, of course, just like any other Empire - it exploited its vassal territories and oppressed its subjects. And yet, the idea that it sought world domination in anything other than its ideology is far-fetched. The concept of World Revolution was cast out when Stalin expelled Trotsky in 1929 and by the late 1960s the Soviet leadership was mostly about stagnant stability rather than fomenting world war. It was in this context that, again and again, they were willing to talk and make treaties - any revolutionary dynamism was long gone, replaced by a weary bureaucracy.

Tanked in post-revolution Prague, 1990

The truth lies perhaps more in what happened after 9 November 1989 rather than before it. For when the Wall came down that evening, it was like a window opening. The world got bigger for sure - by summer 1990 I was driving into former Communist Czechoslovakia with a couple of friends and photographing an overturned army tank in Wenceslas Square, scene of the "Velvet Revolution" that swept the Czech Communist regime from power barely a fortnight after their German comrades had faced their denouement.

Visiting the offices of Civic Forum, the group that had organised the crowds that brought the dissident playwrite Vaclav Havel to the Presidency, I remember buying a badge from an activist who asked me where we came from. When I told him Britain, he smiled enthusiastically and declared, "Long live the Iron Lady!", a reference to our then PM, Margaret Thatcher. He seemed a tad disconcerted when I responded with a grimace of dislike - but neither of us, I am sure, quite appreciated what was about to happen.

For what followed was the wholesale appropriation of public property in former Communist states by a handful of people, sometimes former Party officials, sometimes using violence and frequently deploying corrupt methods. Egged on directly by Thatcher and the "advisers" she sent to the East, the former Soviet block underwent massive economic dislocation that impoverished previously reasonably comfortably off citizens and left them prey to the populism and racism of the far right that has now manifested itself in places like Hungary and Poland.

Equally and notably, in a number of countries the former Communists have retained substantial followings and even occasionally have been re-elected to government. While no one would wish a return of the old Soviet Bloc, the truth is as ever not binary.

The USSR was responsible for some appalling things - just like any Imperial Power. Yet in its seven decades, it transformed a peasant state into a superpower, built homes for hundreds of millions, eradicated illiteracy, pioneered world-class, free public health systems and was the first state to put a satellite and a man and a woman into outer space. While there were queues for consumer goods (something apparently unknown in the UK!), the verified calorific intake of a Soviet citizen in the 1980s was on average higher than in the USA and Soviet leaders may have had their dachas, but they were modest affairs compared to the robber barons of the capitalist Russian mafia. By contrast, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian health indices declined substantially and average life expectancy fell by three years between 1990 and 2005 - though it has since recovered.

East Berlin misery - or my Gran's place?

Touring the DDR (East German) Museum in former East Berlin last year with my wife, we saw round a recreation of a typical Communist era flat from the early 1980s. Expecting something utterly miserable and basic, what I actually encountered was something close to, but slightly bigger, than my grandparents' ground-floor flat in Scotland around the same time.

Years earlier, visiting Prague with my friends in 1990, we lodged with a Czech family in a comfortable, well-equipped flat, one of many similar ones in the suburbs, as the father of the house lamented the "changes". We forget that the education, work and lifestyles available under Communism represented huge progress for many groups, families and individuals who would have been kept consigned to the bottom of the previous capitalist societies they had lived in. Being able to choose between Jo Swinson and Boris Johnson wasn't perhaps as important as some liberals like to think.

Freedom fries at Checkpoint Charlie (the
author did not partake!)

For we assume, of course, that because it's what we are used to, everyone wants to live like us. I remember a particularly crass 1989 British TV commentator droolingly reducing the significance of the fall of the Wall to the opportunity it now gave to East Berliners to sample the dubious delights of Big Macs and fries. Last year, travelling to look at the former crossing of Checkpoint Charlie, well, there we were: a giant Big Mac sign and restaurant gracing the former gateway to freedom.

If there is any lesson from all of this, I think it is that as in so many cases, we are all so more alike than we often understand. Much was wrong, but Eastern Europe was not shrouded in a veil of overwhelming misery for 70 years any more than Western Europe was a land of milk and honey.

And because Stalinist State Communism failed, it doesn't mean that any and all forms of socialism and communism can't work, or aren't in fact needed if we are to avoid the ruin of our world in the years ahead.

Above all, be like Vasili Arkhipov: always question the official narrative and the judgement of your would-be superiors.

One day, you might save the world.

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

Frankie Goes To Damascus

The current impasse over Syria between Presidents Obama and Putin, which came to a head at this week's G20 summit with separate camps and even dinner table snubs, is redolent of a time which supposedly ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Like an unwelcome odour from a stale fridge, a blast of Cold War bombast errupted from both sides, with America shaping up for a unilateral strike on Syria while rumours abound of a possible strike on Saudi Arabia by Putin if an American attack on Damascus goes ahead - Russia holds Saudi Arabia responsible for supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels and to Islamists in Russian-held Chechenya.

In between all this posturing by men who happily sell weapons to nearly all-takers, sit of course millions of innocent Syrians, who side with neither force in their civil war and live in constant fear of attack from all quarters. The delicate balance between different ethnic and religious groups in one of the relatively few genuinely secular states in the Middle East is lost on the policymakers in Moscow and Washington (as well as the media and public nearly everywhere) as they play their Power Politics games, posturing and threatening.

At least following the vote in the House of Commons, Britain seems out of the race to fire missiles into Syria, however accidentally. But what would truly concentrate minds on the only feasible outcome - peace talks - might be if rather than using hi-tech missiles or "boots on the ground" in the form of infantry and marines, our conservative-leaning leaders resorted to a more traditional means of conflict resolution.

Settling war by a duel between the leaders.

David & Goliath dueled to settle the war of the Israelites and Philistines

Yes, perhaps it is time for our Presidents and Premiers to go themselves where they currently put others in harm's way: let Putin and Obama, and Assad and the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria sort it all out in the arena. Middle East "Peace" Envoy Tony Blair could be even thrown in for a bit of warm up sport between them all. After all, look back in history and there are at least a few examples of leaders with the bravery to save the lives of their troops and civilians by settling their scores in precisely this way, and duels, whilst illegal, were a not unknown feature of early US politics.

In more modern times, especially recent decades, not only do political leaders no longer actively participate in the wars they start, many have never even seen military service whilst apparently happily using the military to project their own policies and strategy from the safety of their command posts. They are far removed from the consequences of all their talk, or failure to talk. A system of leaders' duels would soon change that. Indeed, as one writer noted at the time of the Iraq war, when the Iraqi Vice-President was dismissed as "irresponsible" by the White House for suggesting Saddam and Bush fight a duel to settle their differences rather than engage in total war, such personalisation of combat would completely transform international politics.

Sound familiar if far-fetched? Yes, all these year's ago in the mid-1980s, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes envisaged the Soviet and American leaders in (unarmed) hand to hand combat in a boxing ring. So, time to dust down the video and call out our leaders, the donkeys who pretend to be lions.