1. STANISLAV PETROV
IT WAS JUST PAST midnight in Russia on September 26, 1983, and the Cold War was at its coldest… and warriest. A recent transgression by Soviet military forces had left U.S.-Soviet relations more tense than a Sammy Hagar/David Lee Roth threesome—that is to say, somebody was getting a dick in the eye; it was just a matter of time.
The “transgression,” in this case, consisted of Soviet fighter jets blowing a Korean Air Lines passenger plane straight out of the sky. Two hundred sixty-nine people died in this incident, including one Larry McDonald, United States Congressman. Considering that we’re talking about the height of the Cold War here—where a windblown fart would have been reason enough to nuke a continent—that’s a pretty big “incident.” The fighter pilot’s justification for exploding a small town’s worth of people flying in the danger equivalent of a giant retarded duck? The plane maintained radio silence when hailed. Some might call that a “holy fuck-ton of overreaction” just for getting the cold shoulder from a commercial airliner, but you must keep in mind that Russia at the time was a highly volatile place. These kinds of overreactions were probably common in the USSR, leaving hot-blooded young Russian males so high-strung that, upon receiving the cold shoulder from anything—even girlfriends—a reasonable knee-jerk response was to immediately fire high-yield explosives at the offending woman until she plummeted from the sky in flames… probably.
On top of all this preexisting tension, a NATO exercise was under way in Europe. Operation Able Archer had temporarily raised NATO nuclear alert levels in preparation of a simulated nuclear war. To help put the sheer, palpable levels of death in the air in more relatable terms, let’s use us a down-home analogy: Let’s say you and your neighbor don’t get along. Never have, never will. Such is life. But one fine day, your wife wanders onto the neighbor’s sidewalk, whereupon she is immediately hit with a hand grenade by said neighbor, who then runs up and down the border of your two lawns screaming obscenities and insisting that you “don’t have the balls” to do anything about it. Also, you happen to have been outside this entire time, conveniently polishing your collection of machetes and dynamite. Pretty much everybody is going to die here—it’s practically destiny.
And so was the mood when Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov took charge of Serpukhov-15, a Soviet satellite station monitoring the skies for signs of nuclear attack. Petrov had agreed to cover the night shift for a coworker, so he was there when a blip suddenly appeared and the klaxons sounded. The long-distance radar was picking up a nuclear missile launch from America, targeting Moscow. While his fellow officers most likely shit themselves with fear and began slapping at nuclear launch buttons like a bunch of epileptic seamstresses, Petrov calmly deduced that the missile was likely a computer glitch.
• Puget
• Of Silence
• Of Music
• Klaxons
And luckily the right man was in charge. Petrov literally wrote the book on pants-wettingly terrifying near apocalypses; he was actually the author of the manual dictating Russian military response in the event of a perceived nuclear attack. So, being a key member in the development of the early-warning system, he happened to know firsthand that it was a relatively new, untested, and inherently flawed system, little better than a bunch of bells duct-taped together and shot into space to ring if something hit them. Still, it was the only system they had, and it was Petrov’s duty to warn the government of whatever missile attacks it registered, so that they could retaliate before they inevitably died. Because that was all one could do in the event of a full-blown nuclear attack: Not protect yourself, not surrender, not evacuate—just make sure that whoever fucks you gets a good solid boning in return. That’s called Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was the only thing left to do except cry in Petrov’s situation.
But he held fast. “Why would the Americans launch only one missile,” Petrov reasoned, “doing comparatively little damage, but provoking a full-scale counterattack from the Russians?”
If the perceived attack was a glitch and they launched missiles in response, the Americans would launch
And then it got worse! Short of getting sudden, massive, incurable rectal cancer, how the hell could this situation get any worse, you ask? The man is already waiting for a nuclear missile to strike, gambling his human instincts against the cold unerring judgment of a computer with the life of his entire country on the line—how much worse could it possibly get?!
A: Mothers Against Dockworkers
B: Muppets Are Demons
C: Malicious and Delicious
D: Mutually Assured Destruction
Five times, actually.
That’s an oddly precise number, isn’t it? Five times worse; one for each missile that seemed to be launched. One after another, five blips followed suit and appeared on his screen. One missile blip’s a fluke, OK, but surely
Because Petrov is a stone-cold motherfucker, that’s why. In his own (absurdly calm, all things considered) words, “Suddenly the screen in front of me turned bright red. An alarm went off. It was piercing, loud enough to raise a dead man from his grave. For fifteen seconds, we were in a state of shock. We needed to understand, what’s next?”
That’s right. Read that again: fifteen seconds.
I spend ten times longer than that deciding what socks to put on in the morning, and that’s how long it took Petrov to a) process the very real potential of an apocalypse, b) psychoanalyze just how hard-core the Americans’ death wish was, and c) reason out a never-before-seen computer glitch in the Soviet Nuclear Defense system, whereupon he decided to place his entire career on the line in order to save the Earth. In fifteen seconds, Petrov made his assessment, and in three minutes, he would find out if he was right.
You just spent as much time reading the recap of his actions as Petrov did saving the world. But though the decision was made quickly, the wait was impossibly long. As the word START ominously flashed bright red on his terminal, practically begging him to reconsider, Petrov stuck by his decision not to retaliate for three eternal minutes. Three minutes of waiting to find out whether the nuclear missile heading for his face was real. Even if they were waiting in complete and total silence, three minutes is a tense and terrifying length of time to consider your own death. But they weren’t waiting in tomblike quiet: If the system registered more than a single rocket, it was programmed to send immediate word to headquarters. Which kind of makes you wonder what the purpose of Petrov’s whole Atlas-like “only you can decide if the apocalypse is real” duty was, if the computer just goes straight over his head the minute shit gets real anyway, like a little brother in a headlock calling for Mommy. So instead of respectful silence, Petrov spent those three minutes arguing with a panicked man over the phone, screaming commands into the intercom, and, knowing Petrov, probably winning a quick game of Heads-up Basketball while banging eight supermodels in a Ferrari.
