THE NIGHT THE WORLD ALMOST DIED |
This is usually a humor column, but occasionally we come across a serious story that must be told, and depart from our normal format. Especially when the story sheds new light on some of our most cherished misconceptions. This is one of those times.
Ronald Reagan will go down in history as the President who won the Cold War and was responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union. He did that. But on September 26, 1983 his policies almost caused the end of the world.
The summer of 1983 was one of the tensest periods of the Cold War. Reagan had initiated a series of psychological warfare exercises aimed at Moscow, which included naval maneuvers into forward areas near Soviet strategic bastions such as the submarine bases in the Barents Sea. NATO scheduled a military exercise, called Able Archer, for the fall of 1983 that involved raising alert levels of U.S. nuclear forces in Europe to simulate preparations for an attack.
Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was obsessed with the possibility of a surprise nuclear attack by the West and sent instructions to Soviet spies around the world to look for evidence of preparations. In an interview earlier in the year, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff, said that if medium-range missiles planned for deployment in Europe were used against the USSR, the USSR would retaliate directly against the U.S., and that once a nuclear war begins it cannot be limited or controlled.
On September 1 Soviet pilots shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, disrupting any mending of Soviet-American relations. President Reagan said the incident was an international issue that required world leaders to deal with the USSR in an "absolutely firm" manner and produced a "fundamental reappraisal" of the USSR.
The information in the following account is excerpted from a Washington Post article of February 10, 1999:
Just past midnight on September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov settled into the commander’s chair inside the secret bunker at Serpukhov-15, where the Soviet Union monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States.
Then the alarms went off. On the panel in front of him was a red pulsating button. One word flashed: "Start."
One of the Soviet satellites was sending a signal to the bunker that a nuclear missile attack had been launched from a base in the United States. At first, the satellite reported that one missile had been launched – then another, and another. Soon, the system reported that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched. Petrov had to make a decision. Was it for real?
Usually, one report of a lone rocket did not immediately go up the chain to the general staff and the electronic command system there. But in this case, the reports of a missile salvo were coming so quickly that an alert had already gone to general staff headquarters automatically, even before it could be judged if they were genuine.
Despite the electronic evidence, Petrov decided, within five minutes after the alert began, that it was a false alarm. This call may have averted a nuclear holocaust. "I had a funny feeling in my gut. I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it."
The decision was based partly on a guess. 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."
Another factor was that the Soviet ground-based radar installations – which search for missiles rising above the horizon, and were controlled from a different command center – showed no evidence of an attack.
The false alarm was eventually traced to the fact that the satellite picked up the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds and mistook it for a missile launch. (The computer program that was supposed to filter out such information has been rewritten.)
That night in September 1983, the fate of the world depended on the judgment of a 44-year-old Russian lieutenant-colonel. Ironically, the history books would have recorded this as an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union that would have proved that our policy was correct all along. That the Soviet Union really was the Evil Empire and could not be trusted.
Once in a while it takes an extraordinary act of human intelligence to rescue us from the consequences of our technology.