Two men who saved the world

[araucaria]

It is beginning to look like someone in the foreseeable future will be needed to add their name to the list of ‘men who saved the world’. They will need to find something special when you have a Boris Johnson fingering the nuclear button.

The article below explains what happened in 1983:

There was a close call in September 1983, when the Soviet early warning missile attack system malfunctioned, sounding a nuclear alarm. It turned out that sunlight passing through high-altitude clouds over North Dakota made the Soviet space-based system malfunction. It is believed that Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty that day, all but saved the world from nuclear catastrophe. He happened to know that the early warning system was not reliable and refused to pass on the news about a US “nuclear attack” to his commanders, who believed in the system.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-war-arms-race

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this thread (which may be timely!) with the YouTube upload of the PBS documentary about Vasili Arkhipov, the Russian submarine commander who in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis singlehandedly refused to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo which would have almost certainly triggered global thermonuclear war.

For Arkhipov, the term heroic may be a enormous understatement. I watched this again last night, and it's very, very good. Highly recommended.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4VPY2SgyG5w

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this again. For those who don't know the two stories, they're the stuff of which good movies are made. (Interestingly, the heroes were both Russian.)

It seemed pertinent to bring this back into view at a time when quite a few fairly serious and grounded analysts are pointing out that the chances of the current Russia-NATO conflict in Ukraine going nuclear, or very near nuclear, are not zero.

One hopes for sane and cool heads to prevail. I do think they're present in the Kremlin, but definitely nowhere in sight in Washington or Brussels.

[Vicus]

The night the world almost ended

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=quM5obcn8R0

[Bill Ryan]

[norman]

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE NEFARIUM MARCH 21 2024
15 minutes - Posted Mar 21, 2024

SHOW NOTES
What's going on in the US Navy? Joseph suspects there is an ongoing purge in the officer corps... but there are various reasons for it, and they might all be working in tandem:

Navy Fires Commander of USS Ohio -- 3rd Submarine Skipper Relieved in 7 Months


Call me nuts if you like but the way the nuts are going I have a slightly different suggestion from the one Joseph Farrell makes.

The sub captains may have expressed their refusal to nuke the United States !

[Bill Ryan]

In his interview yesterday on The Duran, Jeffrey Sachs, who knows his history in fine and exact detail, recounts the first of the two barrow-escape incidents described on this thread — the one during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

It's in the context of his deploring the lack of any meaningful diplomacy today, and how Kennedy and Khrushchev communicated with each other all the time during the crisis. (And also how, so very interestingly, Khrushchev angrily called out Kennedy for initially lying, which he had in fact done.)

But nevertheless, it wasn't Kennedy or Khrushchev who saved the world. (And yes, this one man really did.) It was Vasily Arkhipov, the flotilla commander who overrode and negated one Soviet submarine captain's order to launch a nuclear torpedo when he mistakenly believed they were under attack.

Go to 19:44 in the video, though Jeffrey Sachs' whole presentation about diplomacy prior to that is fascinating and most, most important.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TAbi_2mbVKM