A Second To Midnight

Nuclear Close Calls

As Sagan observes, ‘deterrence optimism is based on mistaken nostalgia and faulty analogy […] there were many close calls.’ It is nothing short of a miracle that the few nuclear weapon accidents that had occurred have caused remarkably low casualties and environmental damage. At times, the future of humanity rested in the hands of individuals who have opted to exercise restraints, second-guess their technology or directly disobey orders.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, on 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov protested the decision of his B-29 captain Valentin Savitsky, who urged for nuclear retaliation against what turned out to be a US warning shot, not a lethal nuclear attack in the making. Save for that lone officer decision, the Soviet nuclear attack would have obliterated the USS Randolf. If, as indeed was the protocol for such a situation, the Pentagon’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) would be implemented in response, the world would immediately find itself gripped by an outright nuclear war.

In 1983, lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov found himself in the same position of Atlas. Following the Soviet shooting down of the KAL007, Petrov’s early warning system, in a storm of awry circumstances, reported 6 nuclear missiles fired from the US, headed toward the USSR. Petrov disobeyed orders of the Soviet military protocol when he opted not to react. He later remarked that he ‘knew perfectly well that nobody would be able to correct my mistake if [he] had made one.’ His decision not to report what turned out to be a false alarm was shakily based on the belief that a US first-strike nuclear attack would be an ‘all out,’ which did not match the 6 nuclear warheads appearing on his early warning system.

He noted that he believed most of his colleagues would have obeyed the protocol, which would translate to an immediate nuclear ‘retaliation.’

The well-known stories of Arkhipov and Petrov are but two on the lengthy list of nuclear close calls — there have been several instances of faulty early warning systems, incorrect intelligence or confused data reading before and notably, after.

We currently live in the third consecutive decade without a reported nuclear attack close call. However, the 1983 Able Archer saga produced several nuclear false alarms, and the 1991 Gulf War and the 1995 Black Brant scare make the insistence of nuclear-armed states that nuclear weapons keep humanity ‘safe’ utterly apocryphal.

Marija Carter LLM