The Man Who Saved the World

As I write this, another “doomsday” has come and gone, this one predicted to occur on September 23 by a man who calls himself a “Christian numerologist”.  But also in the news was the belated announcement of the passing of a former Russian army officer named Stanislov Petrov.  Stanislov did not make a name for himself by predicting doomsday.  He actually prevented one from occurring.

It happened during a very dark time in our history, when relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were probably at their worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It was September 26, 1983, nearly four years after the Soviet Union had begun its invasion of Afghanistan, and less than a month after a Korean Airlines passenger jet had been shot down by Soviet missiles – an act that President Reagan declared to be a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity”.  (Among the passengers on this airliner was a U.S. congressman: Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia.)  Tensions were very high on bold sides of the Cold War, and it was in this charged atmosphere, on the night of September 26, that Stanislov Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel who was manning the nuclear early warning system that evening, heard the alarm indicating that a U.S. nuclear strike against Russia had just been initiated.  A Russian satellite reported that five ballistic missiles with atomic bombs were headed for Russia at that moment.

What Stanislov was supposed to do was immediately notify his superior officers, who would probably have ordered a counterstrike, which in turn would have been the actual opening salvo of a nuclear war.  What he chose to do instead went against all of his military training, and against all of the expectations about how he was to perform his duties in a situation such as this.  He did nothing.  Or rather, he called his superiors and reported that the system was malfunctioning.  He did this, not out of fear (although he was of course terrified), or because he harbored some defeatist death wish against the Soviet regime, but because something about this alarm just did not feel right to him, and he realized that the costs of acting in error would be devastating to the world.  He also knew, however, that if the attack was genuine, then the missiles would be arriving in twelve minutes, and any Soviet counterattack would have to be initiated within this narrow timeframe.  Stanislov waited, in agonized silence, for those minutes to pass,

He was right, of course – there had been no U.S. nuclear attack in progress.  Later it was determined that the early warning system had erroneously identified sunlight reflecting off clouds over North Dakota (where some of America’s nuclear arsenal is housed) as a launch of missiles.  Ironically, Stanislov was not lauded by the Soviet military command for his actions.  Instead, he was reprimanded for not properly filling out the operations log that night.

If ever there were a moment in which the history of our civilization could have followed two entirely different courses, based upon one single act, this was it.  I was in college at the University of Illinois when this event occurred, and of course my fellow students and I were oblivious to the fact that a nuclear war had been narrowly averted, as everyone (except Stanislov, his closest friends, and the Russian military) would be for many, many years.  Two months later, on November 20, 1983, ABC television aired a movie titled The Day After, about a fictional nuclear war fought between the United States and the Soviet Union (which in the film was started, coincidentally, in September).  The movie showed, in horrific and explicit detail (while never actually explaining who initiated the nuclear strike) that there would be no “winners” after such a conflict, because the ecological devastation to the planet would be immense and long-lasting.

 

 But actual events followed an entirely different course.  Just two years later, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and in 1986 Gorbachev was holding serious discussions with U.S. President Ronald Reagan about the mutual elimination of all nuclear weapons within the next ten years.  (Ironically, President Reagan’s movement away from a hawkish stance toward the “evil empire” had been influenced at least in part by The Day After, which he had watched, commenting that the movie was “very effective and left me greatly depressed”.  It is unknown whether Gorbachev also saw the film, but it was allowed to be shown in the Soviet Union in 1987.)  Under Gorbachev’s leadership, radical programs were initiated that eventually led to the introduction of market reforms, a greater tolerance for freedom of speech and domestic dissidents, an end to the war in Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the U.S.S.R., and the end of formal hostilities between Russia and the West.  It is hard to remember, now, the sense of general elation back then: that the decades of two enemy superpowers poised to destroy each other with massive arsenals of nuclear weapons had finally come to end, and that the new issue of concern was how to best spend the “peace dividend” which no longer had to be used for weapons of war.  This euphoric period of beating swords into plowshares proved to be all too brief and, in retrospect, only a respite from other hostilities and threats that would emerge in the ensuing decades, but it would have never happened at all had it not been for that Russian officer making a terrifying judgment call.

It is a stark object lesson that while rash, foolish or willfully evil acts of persons can produce devastating consequences on a large scale (as evidenced in the recent mass shooting tragedy in Las Vegas), courageous and sensible persons, too, can make a difference in the world in significant ways.  These are the persons who have the temerity to assert themselves in meeting rooms when a majority of seemingly intelligent and rational people endorse irrational courses of action.  Robert Boisjoly, an engineer who worked on the American space shuttle project, exhibited this kind of temerity when on January 27, 1986, he argued on a conference call with NASA management that the Challenger mission scheduled for launch the next day was in danger of catastrophic failure.  Boisjoly explained that he and his fellow engineers had discovered a problem with a component on the shuttle’s booster rockets that could catastrophically fail at low temperatures.  (The expected temperature at the time of launch was 30℉.)  Sadly, his arguments went unheeded, and the Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off.  Sometimes it is not people that the courageously sensible have to resist, but processes, procedures, customs, and laws that have been deemed to be necessary and appropriate, like that early warning system in the Soviet Union, or, decades earlier, the signs in the United States prohibiting black people from using certain restrooms or drinking fountains.

That it is difficult to be courageously sensible was proven in a very stark way by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, when he designed and conducted a series of experiments to test the extent to which a person would act in an injurious way, simply because another person in authority directed that it be done.  The general format of the experiment involved inviting a person to assist in conducting a learning experiment.  The person was shown a test subject in an adjacent room, strapped to a table with electrical wires attached to the body.  The “assistant” was instructed to ask a series of questions via microphone to the subject, and, whenever an incorrect response was received, to press a button which administered an electrical shock.  After each incorrect response, the voltage increased, until a maximum shock of 450 volts – which was clearly indicated as a danger level – was reached.  What the assistant did not know was that he or she was actually the subject of the experiment, and that the person in the other room was merely an actor, pretending to be shocked.  This actor would do a number of things to attempt to dissuade the assistant from administering further shocks, such as yelling out in pain, banging on the wall, and, eventually, not responding to the questions at all.  (Inactivity on the part of the subject being questioned, the director of the experiment explained to the assistant, was to be treated as an incorrect response.)  While many if not most of the subjects of this experiment showed clear signs of being uncomfortable when administering higher voltage shocks, 65% of them continued (at the urging of the person in authority) until they reached the maximum lethal level of 450 volts, even though by this point the “learner” appeared to be totally unconscious and unresponsive.

Sadly, it appears to be a common human trait to obey persons in authority, and to conform to procedures and customs, even when it is evident that these could produce – or are producing – terrible outcomes.  It is a somber spectacle of civilization that persons who are rational and compassionate in ordinary circumstances will allow themselves to be complicit in activities that are injurious to others, and even disastrous to many.  An example that has been playing itself out in recent years is the series of revelations that several men in positions of power or prominence had been sexually exploiting and abusing women (or, in cases involving clergymen and coaches, boys) who had been in their employ or who were otherwise vulnerable to their depredations.  What is most shocking about these revelations is how long the behavior of these abusers had been going on – in some cases, for decades.  Such a thing was only possible because men and women who were aware of the abusive behavior did nothing to oppose it, or even bring it to light, thereby being accomplices to the crimes in varying degrees.  For many of these enablers, the personal cost or risk of adverse consequences for exposing the crimes would have been very slight.  But even this was too high of a price for them to step forward and challenge the behavior, or even report it.  One can only imagine how many of the great evils of our civilization would have been prevented if more people had been willing to pay such a small price, when they had the opportunity to do so.  It only highlights the heroism of that apparent minority of persons who resist the tide, go against the grain, question and even resist authority, and chart an unpopular course that follows the higher dictates of their consciences, or just their common sense.

And so, I honor the memory of Stanislov Petrov, the man who was willing to pay the price of potential ostracism or retaliation in order to save the world from an irremediable catastrophe.  Forty years later, as the world watches two narcissistic, egomaniacal leaders taunting each other with the threat of nuclear warfare, Petrov’s heroism provides a striking historical contrast.  We can only hope that there are others like him, who will do the right thing at the vital moment when it counts.  We all must aspire to exhibit Petrov’s courage to swim against the tide, when doing so might prevent an unpleasant fate for others.  Now more than ever, it seems, human civilization requires many Stanislov Petrovs.