On September 26, 1983, the world came close to nuclear annihilation. On that date, Col. Stanislav Petrov was the ranking officer at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow, a facility housing the command center for the Soviet Early Warning System.
Petrov's job was to watch for nuclear threats and notify superiors of impending attacks against the Soviet Union. The computer system indicated a full-scale nuclear launch by the United States, and Petrov was required to pass this information up the chain of command, which would then order a retaliatory barrage of nuclear missiles (hundreds were aimed at American cities).
Petrov sensed something was wrong. Because of this, he hesitated. In other words, his humane instincts outweighed his duty to the state.
Within minutes he had determined that the computer was wrong, there had been no attack, and his superiors were none the wiser. His insubordination, which later came to light, may have saved the lives of millions of Americans and spared the world what now seems inevitable: nuclear war.
There is only one Col. Petrov in the world, but there are now at least 30,000 nuclear weapons across the planet. The U.S. is known to have 12,000, the former Soviet Union 16,000, China 400, France 350, Israel 200, Great Britain 185, and India and Pakistan 40 each. North Korea has purified enough plutonium to produce half a dozen explosives, and many experts believe Iran is close to achieving this dubious capacity.
Since these weapons are useless against terrorists, such arsenals are utter (and expensive) folly.
The vast majority of people alive today have grown up in a world with atomic weapons. The smallest of these bombs were the charmingly-named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The nuclear bombs now in operation will not be dropped from planes but attached to missiles, which stand on hair-trigger alert. These bombs make Fat Man and Little Boy look like firecrackers.
If you fission a pound of plutonium—standard strength for these weapons—you get 8,000 tons of TNT yield. That's eight times the strength of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Tim McVeigh's truck bomb, which destroyed an Oklahoma City government building and killed 168 people, was "only" 1,000 pounds of TNT—one-half of one ton. If you fuse a pound of deuterium—again, fairly standard—you get as much as 26,000 tons of TNT yield.
These newest nukes, if detonated, can leave temperatures in tens of millions of degrees—not thousands of degrees like a regular explosive—hot enough to vaporize any living thing within miles of ground zero. The blast also creates winds of 400 miles per hour, which can flatten buildings. The explosion leaves short- and long-term radiation effects on anyone or anything "lucky" enough to survive.
The pertinent question, then, is not "Why do we have these weapons?" but "Have we all gone collectively insane?"
Given the enormity of the threat—and no threat, save perhaps global warming, approaches that of nuclear weapons—why is it so seldom mentioned? Have the inhabitants of planet earth, so accustomed to living with this morbid curse, simply accepted it—the way an abused family accepts the alcoholism of its provider?
What will it take for the six billion of us—the potential pool of victims—to arrange an intervention? How do we convey to the powers that be that this is unacceptable and intolerable?
Just as a loaded gun will inevitably be fired, a nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger alert will be activated, either by accident (as would have happened had not Petrov been on duty) or by design, as the North Korean madman keeps threatening to do.
