Just past midnight today in 1983, thanks to “a funny feeling in my gut,” 44 year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov’s calm assessment that a satellite warning of the launch of five US Minuteman ICBMs was a false alarm likely averted a catastrophic nuclear war. https://t.co/J5MrBr3XAO pic.twitter.com/2sPO4KDqON
— Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) September 26, 2021
Raise your hand, fellow boomers, if this was the stuff of your childhood nightmares…
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the soviet’s scapegoat pic.twitter.com/JyfmhgnS4I
— TomHardly030585721774 (@HardlyRealTom) September 26, 2021
Petrov died in May 2017 in Moscow of hypostatic pneumonia. He was 77. https://t.co/A0BfZRwprL
— Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) September 26, 2021
Today is also the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. When Col. Petrov was confronted with what turned out to be a false alarm 38 years ago, there were more than 59,300 nuclear weapons worldwide. Today, there are about 13,100. https://t.co/bIPBRBg1EB
— Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) September 26, 2021
WaterGirl
I was only aware of the close call when JFK was president.
Baud
Not bad for a day’s work.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I just saw an Amazon movie about the Russian who leaked the Cuban Missile papers to hid UK contact.
raven
@WaterGirl: Pick this one up
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safet
WaterGirl
@raven: Ignorance apparently is bliss.
VOR
There are multiple missing nuclear warheads. There is a H-bomb buried in the ocean sediment off Savannah, GA (Tybee Island incident). Nuclear torpedoes from the sinking of the USS Scorpion. The Soviet Golf submarine (K-129) the CIA partially raised in Project Azorian supposedly had nuclear torpedoes.
NotMax
Coincidentally just minutes ago finished watching a curiosity amongst post-nuclear war productions, BBC’s adaptation of Summer Day’s Dream, on Prime.
Cermet
Didn’t seem that long ago when he died; I noted both his death and reason for his fame in a BJ post that day.
MazeDancer
Still can’t believe CBS is broadcasting Big Brother instead of the Tony Awards.
If you are getting the Paramount free trial to watch, don’t forget to cancel during the show. You still get the 7 free days.
raven
@VOR: I love the part in the book where they have a nuke armed jet guarded by a Spanish soldier with a rifle!
frosty
@raven: I read that book a couple of years ago. Incredible, scary close calls. Not to mention the environmental damage from the missile propellants.
prostratedragon
Thank you, Col. Petrov. I always have thought that we haven’t blundered into The BIg One due to well-placed sanity on both sides.
raven
@frosty: From a dude dropping a wrench!
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Read up on Able Archer. Even more of a close call.
Mike in NC
A really dumb guy once asked, “What’s the point of having nuclear weapons if you’re not willing to use them?”
mrmoshpotato
@Mike in NC: A Soviet shitpile mobster conman?
NotMax
@frosty
Stuff doesn’t even make halfway passable torpedo juice.
:)
dr. bloor
@WaterGirl: In this context, ignorance is not necessarily “bliss,” but reppressing an ongoing awareness of the tightrope our species is walking does keep you from going stark raving insane.
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: Good Lord !
lowtechcyclist
As a Boomer growing up just outside the Beltway, my classmates and I figured that if there was a nuclear war, we’d be vaporized before we knew anything was going on, and largely stopped worrying about it.
Cermet
The worse part of the Scorpion (Nuclear Attack Sub), was it was sunk by its own Torpedo; while the Navy unofficially acknowledges they heard the whole incident so they know the details – through an accident a torpedo was activated (the propellant ignited) threatening to incinerate the crew, so the Captain launched the torpedo, turned the sub 180, and ran like hell hoping to get out of range when the torpedo went active (search mode and armed.) Obviously, they failed. That is the story I read about that disaster.
mrmoshpotato
:)
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: A boss early in my career had a print of a painting in his office…
The Last Washington Painting (Premonitions of the Corporate Wars).
Kinda gets your attention!
Cheers,
Scott.
Anne Laurie
In 1962 or so, a classmate asked our second-grade teacher why we weren’t doing the ‘duck & cover’ drills they’d seen on tv. Sister John Edwards replied that, since we were living in the Bronx, our first notice of a nuclear attack by the Godless communists would be a flash of light as we were vaporized. Therefore, our best & only practical preparation for such an event was to keep our souls in a state of sinlessness at all times, just in case.
For some reason, I found this insufficiently comforting, when it came to theories of nuclear deterrence.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I spent most of 1983 – 1985 worried about nuclear war. Especially after reagan’s hot mic moment about bombing the russians.
zhena gogolia
@Anne Laurie: She was right, tho.
Another Scott
Pelosi says things are progressing. Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF – really??) on Thursday.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@MazeDancer: On principle, I will not sign up for their service in order to get something that should be on TV. Even if it doesn’t cost me money, I think that’s a bad direction to go in and I don’t want to support it.
zhena gogolia
@Another Scott: I think that’s one of Willy Loman’s sons.
Staying out of the thread above so I don’t get nervous about not being able to get a booster. Like the vaccine, it will happen when it happens. BJ is like “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Cameron
@Baud: I saw it, too. Interesting POV – the Russian wasn’t the protagonist.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: The way I see it, waiting a bit for the Moderna booster just means they will know a bit more when we are getting it. I have heard that it will likely be just a few more weeks.
Plus Moderna antibodies last longer than Pfizer, so we are okay. Just be careful. :-)
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: I had Pfizer, but my doctor and the local Stop & Shop and Walgreen’s won’t give me a booster yet. They say they’re “waiting on guidance from the state,” but someone here on BJ who’s in the same state said they already got it. It’s annoying.
But we’re getting the flu shot next week, so I’d have to wait anyway.
ETA: Plus hard to be careful when you are teaching without any distancing (masks and vaccines, though, and we get tested every week, that’s all that’s keeping me from panicking).
phdesmond
@Another Scott:
that looks like it should read “a BFD vote.”
AxelFoley
@lowtechcyclist:
Did you learn to love the bomb, too? ?
Sure Lurkalot
@zhena gogolia: I’m staying away because reading about side effects is a bummer. And, the oh no, I didn’t get any so did it take?
Knowing about and anticipating side effects from drugs and vaccines is good practice but for some, it has a deterrent effect.
Hungry Joe
I begged my father to build a fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He brought home a five-gallon Arrowhead water bottle and called it good. I was not comforted.
zhena gogolia
@Sure Lurkalot: Yeah. I tend to be stoic about side effects (maybe because I tend not to have them?).
oatler
Remember “Fail Safe”?
Geminid
@VOR: Wikipedia’s article on theTybee Island incident reminded me a little of the movie Rashoman. There was definitely a collision between an F-86 and a B-47 around 2am on February 5, 1958. It also seems certain that the bomber’s crew jettisoned a hydrogen bomb over Wassaw Sound in order to enable a smoother emergency landing. But was the bomb a complete, operational weapon? The Air Force found paperwork showing that the bomb contained a 150 pound practice piece of lead instead of a plutonium trigger. Then, in 1966, an Assistant Secretary of Defence testified to Congress that this thermonuclear bomb was in fact a complete weapon. So the Air Force went back into it’s records and fortunately found documentation showing that the bomb could not have been complete, that B-47s were not authorized to carry live versions of this particular bomb until June of 1958, when safer plutonium triggers were introduced.
Irregardless (as we say) of whether the bomb was a complete one, a concerted effort was made to locate it. Crack Navy divers scoured the Sound, and soggy GIs tromped around nearby salt marshes. After a month, though, the search was abruptly called off when another B-47 accidently dropped it’s hydrogen bomb near Florence, South Carolina.
In 2004, a retired Air Force colonel and his friend trolled a Geiger counter around Wassaw Sound, and found unusual radioactivity. They even narrowed the bomb’s location to an area the size of a football field, or so they thought. But it was subsequently determined that there was only naturally occurring radiation from a deposit of monazite.
Anne Laurie
@zhena gogolia: Oh, I knew she was right (I checked with my dad, who was just getting me started on my career as an sf fan). I just didn’t think it was fair to be presented with that kind of ontological challenge before I even made my first communion!
Jean
@zhena gogolia: Dorothy and I were joking about no side-effects and “vaccine not working.”
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: I had not known that they aren’t distancing. That would be stressful.
RaflW
I’m among the oldest of the Xers, and I remember well worrying about nuclear war. My best friend, who is a 1966 baby, wanted to start an anti-bomb club at my elementary school in Tulsa, OK. I don’t think it would have been well received, but he was clearly on the precociously worried side.
WaterGirl
@Hungry Joe: Tough love?
cs
I’m gen X. From ages 11-14, that was my dominant fear. Reagan was not good for my mental health. All the scares, all the tension. Then the run of nuclear war movies. Being a masochist, I watched every single one.
1983 was an especially tense year. We didn’t know about Petrov or Able Archer at the time, but we could feel it.
Didn’t help that I was stuck in an evangelical church which considered the end times right around the corner. Regularly pushing end-of-the-world stuff in our heads. But they didn’t worry too much about it. They just knew God would rapture them before the bombs went off.
Procopius
I’ve been increasingly worried since John Bolton became well known during the Bush administration. I’ve read, and believe, stories that many people in the State Department accept his beliefs as realistic. My concern was multiplied many-fold when anonymous people were suggesting, after we failed to follow up on our promises to PRNK and they resumed testing missiles, that we could drop a “tactical” nuke on their missile range. The argument was that they would just shrug off the “bloody nose,” which was all it would amount to. If that story was true, and I believe it was, we have a number of raging lunatics in our foreign policy establishment, which I think is still true.