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Just doing my job
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September 26, 2024"I was literally just doing my job." — Stanislav Petrov ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Hey look, a chance to support the newsletter!
Please let me know here if you can't see the ads. Thanks! ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ Leave luck to heavenHow old are you? Well, I don't mean to alarm you, but if you were alive on September 26, 1983, you might have almost died. Me too. Everyone, frankly, or at least we came close to it. And almost nobody knew about any of this for many years afterward. It has to do with how close we came to nuclear war. To set the stage, here's a list of a few things that had happened during the previous year:
Oh, and dating back to 1981, the U.S. had been running a psyops campaign intended to keep the Soviet leadership in a constant state of guesswork about American intentions -- things like faking the early stages of a U.S. attack, only to divert at the last minute. Here's how one Reagan-era official described it in a declassified U.S. intelligence report: "It really got to them. They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then, at the last minute, the squadron would peel off and return home." In retrospect, this seems over-the-top stupid, right? It had the intended effect, however, of putting the Soviets on a hair trigger and expecting an attack. In fact, even before he became Soviet leader, Andropov had begun a military intelligence program called Operation RYAN, which was all about finding ways to get an early warning of any U.S. missile strike. Against all that, let's meet Stanislav Petrov, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, and who was the officer on duty at a Soviet antimissile command about 80 miles from Moscow 41 years ago today. Just after midnight, computers in the bunker reported that the U.S. had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile that was headed toward the Soviet Union and that four more were on the way. Petrov's standing order was to report any incoming missile so that the people above him in the chain of command could order an immediate full-scale attack on the United States. But Petrov decided not to report it -- based on an educated guess, a prediction of what would happen if he did report it, and a desire not to be one of the last links in a chain that would start World War III and kill millions. Obviously, he was correct; months later it was learned that the incoming missile alert was the result of a satellite error. The whole episode remained secret for more than a decade, until after the fall of the Soviet Union. After it was out, however, The Washington Post interviewed Petrov in 1999. In the end, less than five minutes after the alert began, Petrov decided the launch reports must be false. He recalled making the tense decision under enormous stress – electronic maps and consoles were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and juggled an intercom in the other, trying to take in all the information at once. Another officer at the early-warning facility was shouting into the phone to him to remain calm and do his job.
"I had a funny feeling in my gut," Petrov said. "I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it."
Petrov's decision was based partly on a guess, he recalled. He had been told many times that a nuclear attack would be massive – an onslaught designed to overwhelm Soviet defenses at a single stroke. But the monitors showed only five missiles. "When people start a war, they don't start it with only five missiles," he remembered thinking at the time. "You can do little damage with just five missiles."
Afterward, Petrov said he was neither punished nor rewarded for his efforts that day, but that he retired from the military and became a widower and a pensioner, at one point after the fall of the Soviet Union growing his own potatoes for food. And, he was surprised in his later years to realize that he'd been lauded for his actions (which gives us our quote of the day): "At first when people started telling me that these TV reports had started calling me a hero, I was surprised," he said in a 2014 interview. "I never thought of myself as one. After all, I was literally just doing my job." Moral of the story for most of us? Be grateful sometimes, for the things you didn't even know about.
As of when I'm writing this, we've had about 70+ readers share their "earliest childhood memories" as part of yesterday's Understandably newsletter. You can read some of the comments here, or even add your own. I'll explain a bit more in tomorrow's Understandably, and then again next week. Thanks! Did you see ...
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Bill Murphy Jr.
Hi. I write the Understandably daily newsletter—no algorithms, no outrage, just an essential daily newsletter trusted by 175,000+ smart people who want to understand the world, one day at a time. Plus bonus ebooks (aka 'Ubooks').
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