RIP Stanislav Petrow

[Skybird]

It seems that just this September it became known that Stanislav Petrov already died on May 19th this year.

If you do not know the name - Ltn-Col Petrow is the reason why we all are still here today. On September 1983 he rated a general ICBM alarm of the Sovjet missile defence system as a technical failure instead of confirming to Moscow that it was an American all-out attack on the Sovjet Union. Therefore, a full scaled Sovjet nuclear retalation was cancelled. All this within just ten minutes.

If he would have trusted what his eyes saw on the monitors, on that day the world as we know it would have ended in a global thermonuclear war.

Make a mental note. You, me, we all owe to him, and its a shame that he lived lonely and forgotten in the past 20 years, and now had died unknown and unnoticed.

Its a dilemma, and it is tragic however. He saved the world, by being disobedient and thus proving the system as erratic, thus they did not present his case as an example for good soldiering. Good soldiers trust their senses and obey orders and follow trained procedures. He violated all that. As a soldier, he "failed". And by that saved the world. Sometimes, life sucks.

[Jimbuna]

It could be argued he is the man who saved the world.

RIP

[Commander Wallace]

As Sky already said, we owe this man a debt of gratitude.


Rest in peace Stanislav Petrov

[mapuc]

RIP Stanislav and thank you for keeping your head calm when it really was needed.

Markus

[Platapus]

I wonder if the roles were reversed, would we have had the same mentality?

[Sailor Steve]

I thought the story sounded familiar, if not the name. We had a brief discussion of his action four years ago.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=202381&highlight=Stanislav+Petrov

[Catfish]

I wonder if the roles were reversed, would we have had the same mentality?

Well it is not my job since "we" (Germany) don't have the bomb, and are thus not able to cause or prevent a (the last) nuclear strike.

Thinking of the USA: Probably not, and if someone in the US military would had saved the world that way, he probably would have been court martialed and kicked out immediately for not exactly following orders. I always thought that Dr. Strangelove was a joke, but it is not. I fear the predominant western military has lost its contact to reason and the real world.
Next: militarising the police..

[Skybird]

Of course there is the chance that an American individual in Petrow's seat would have acted the same way, wondering why the USSR would attack the west with one missile, and then another one, and an hour later with a third one. Whether the system to which this individual reports would as willingly accept a failure of its billions-of-dollars-expensive system as the Sovjet high command did, would remain to be seen, but chances are that Americans are as unwilling to launch third world war as the Sovjets were. We can nicely see it in the present, today, a korean missiles again was fired across the Japanese islands, this time about the main island, right through the middle. Despite blablabla and bla and blabla and more blablablabla, the US will do nothing, and is even ridiculing itself by asking Russia and China to do more.

Launching conventional invasions against inferior non-nuclear opponents like Iraq, is one thing. Beginning a huge thermonuclear world war, is something different. Since WWII the US have not taken military fights against enemies equal in strength to themselves, they always started against perceived "dwarfs" only. Which sometimes was an underestimation of that dwarf.