Seventy-two minutes to midnight
Up until yesterday I didn’t know the name Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. That’s particularly odd because, in 1983, Petrov saved my life. Not only that, if you were born in 1983 or earlier he probably saved your life as well. If you were born after 1983 then he probably saved your parents’ lives. I’m surprised high schools aren’t named after him. Lots and lots of high schools.
Anyway, a mere three weeks after the Soviet Union shot down Korean Airlines Flight 700 — on 26 September 1983 to be precise — Mr Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Soviet Union’s Oko nuclear early-warning system. That was when the system reported that a missile, heading for the Soviet Union, had just been launched from the United States. The system then announced that four more missiles had been launched, also from the United States.
That is the point at which Mr Petrov saved my life by doing what he did next. He did absolutely nothing at all. What he was SUPPOSED to do was to report the attack. Soviet protocol mandated that any missile attack from the United States required a massive counterattack. Mr Petrov didn’t want to risk it.
Instead of reporting the missile launch like a good little robot, he employed his sense of reason. Why, Petrov wondered, only five missiles? Wouldn’t the United States launch hundreds of missiles if they were launching a preemptive strike? It didn’t make sense. He used his big brain to wait for confirmation. That confirmation never came. It never came because it turned out there was a bug in the system. No missiles had been launched at all.
I was living in San Diego at the time, a major military target during a time of nuclear war. We would have been hit by a counter strike. Everyone in San Diego would have died. The same was true of every other major city in the United States. The poison released into the atmosphere and the subsequent nuclear winter would have killed just about everyone else.
What held true in 1983 holds true today. As it was in 1983, today there is no such thing as a “nuclear war” per se, not in the conventional sense of the word “war.” Mutually-assured annihilation is a better term. Within one hour and twelve minutes of the first missile launch, five eights of the world’s population of human beings will be dead. That is, 5 billion people. Billion with a “B.” Most of the remaining 3 billion will die from radiation poisoning in a few months, or freeze or starve to death during the coming nuclear winter. The handful that remain will be Hunter-gatherers again, just like during the Stone Age.
In January the launch codes to 400 nuclear silos, 14 nuclear subs, 66 nuclear bombers, a total of 1770 nuclear weapons in all, will be handed to an easily-offended, vindictive lunatic. Last time the American people were crazy enough to do something like that he was surrounded by many people who fully understood the gravity of what was happening. This time it’s not so clear that anyone around Trump understands that. I hope they do.
So why am I telling you all this? Because I want to make it clear to everyone the danger we are in and why it’s so important that we all work together to fix this. The only solution to this kind of lunacy is total disarmament.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” We can’t afford one such misunderstanding or miscalculation. We must all realise that, when it comes to this kind of scenario, there is just one and only one enemy, and that enemy is war itself.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.