Redemption of the Humankind

The WW2 war was done and dusted with the surrender of Japan in 1945, but the race for dominance was far from over. Two unlikely allies were staring down at each other with aggression and uncompromising passion to rule the arena and this lead to the emergence of two super powers: The USA and the Soviet Union commonly known as U.S.S.R.

“The democrats and the communists can never be on the same page” as its always said. It was just a matter of time before all hell would break loose and so it did and this led to the birth of “Cold War”. The war was psychological in nature rather than transgressional. Many new ideologies rose up so did the nuclear stockpile. Presently the world holds around 13,000 active warheads, however at the peak of the cold war, once the U.S.S.R held 45,000 active nuclear warhead alone. It’s all in the history with most part of it forgotten. 

One such forgotten tale from the past during peak period is “1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident”. The tempers were all time high after the Soviet Union had recently shot down Seoul bound Korean Airliner killing all 269 civilians on board. On 26^th September 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stansilav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defence Force was officer in charge of a military bunker named “Serpukhov-15”, just outside Moscow. Soon after midnight, the alarm went off, and the computer reported that a nuclear capable ballistic missile was headed for Moscow, soon it was discovered that four additional missiles along with that have been launched and was expected to hit within a matter of minutes. At this point of time, Petrov had a direct protocol of intimating his seniors in the HQ and launching a retaliatory nuclear missile launch under the military doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). It was a nail biting moment for everyone, going with his human conscience, Petrov thought that it could very well be possible that the alarm system is malfunctioning. Soon he was proven right after no missile were reported in the radar, it was concluded that the computer detection system showed false result and no missile had been launched by US or the NATO forces. The alarm went off few more times after that in the same manner, by this time it was obvious that the system isn’t functioning.

An enquiry was launched soon after, a person who literally saved the world from a potential nuclear war should have been rewarded and recognized well. However, the fallout of the entire episode depicted a different story all together. The enquiry which was launched should have been launched on the engineers and scientist, rather Petrov was put on remand for that. Initially he was promised to be rewarded, but adversely he was transferred to a suburb, defamed, humiliated and even forced into early retirement.

It seems a bit intriguing as why someone would be treated so harshly who single handedly saved humankind? The answer is very straightforward but with a very bleak logic, he was part of a communist regime and for a communist nation, “propaganda is all that matters.” The acceptance of technological failure would have bought massive embarrassment to their propaganda driven ideology and rule. In fact this entire episode of “almost initialization of Nuclear War” didn’t even come out till the next decade. It was only after the fall of U.S.S.R in 1990, when this whole incident was revealed.

As far as Petrov was concerned he stated that, if the US and the NATO forces were to launch an all-out nuclear attack on Kremlin, there wouldn’t just be five missiles, rather hundreds of missiles would be launched in simultaneous manner in order to avoid any sort of retaliation.       

This entire scenario deemed to be a perfect example of why prestige has always dominates self-righteousness . No one would have raised any question, even if he would have gone as per his protocol and started WW3 but he choose not to. A soldier with direct set of protocols simply decided to go against all his military ethics and training did manage to save the humanity after all but at the cost of himself and has dwindled in past somewhere.