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The Man Who Literally Saved the World
99luftballon writes "Today is an important anniversary for Russian hero Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet missile commander who saved the world from nuclear destruction in 1983. Sadly there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing. How long will we keep getting lucky?"
``Frankly, the India/Pakistan development of a nuclear arsenol worries me more than what happened historically between the U.S. & Russia.''
What worries me is that, at some point, the Russian government wasn't able to pay all it's employees' wages. What does that say about a rich and determined party being able to acquire some of the stored weapons? Even if such a scenario is highly unlikely, I'm still more worried about that than about what a state with citizens and territory might do with nuclear weapons.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Wow. The babysitter I hire for my kids was born in 1992.
Between you, she, and a host of the current MTV generation, you guys have no concept of:
The significance of the Berlin Wall - you used to be able to buy pieces of it when you were in grade school.
Life before the internet.
Life without cell phones.
A time when you couldn't buy telephones in the store - they had to be leased from the Bells and from their stores.
61 cents a minute to a town 90 miles away was the normal fee for intrastate long distance.
Life before VCRs; and yeah, the Wizard of OZ was on every Easter and that was your only chance to see it.
There was a smoking section in airplanes and the ashtrays in the arm rests used to open.
A time before the Space Shuttle.
A time when rocket trips to the moon were current events. My 6th birthday had the Apollo capsule on the cake.
A time before Star Wars.
A time when your local TV weatherman hosted a kids show on their station. It's kind of against regulations now.
And as far as I matter, Cuba has always been shut off to the US. I eagerly await the day when travel from the US will be allowed.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Because both the United States and Russia blew up hundreds, if not thousands of atomic and hydrogen bombs during testing?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Adding to the reasons you have given, consider that the US had very valid concerns that Japan may be nearing completion of its own nuclear weapon . Immediately before Germany's fall, in May of 1945, U-234 (almost an ironic name) was captured by US forces. Its mission had been to transfer to Japan enough Uranium for two nuclear weapons, two fully disassembled ME-262's, full documentation of Nazi Germany's nuclear efforts to date, centrifuge technology, a V-2 rocket expert, etc.. While unknown at the time, the Japanese Navy may have even had a sneak attack capability against the mainland US in the form of the I-400 submarine aircraft carriers.
U-234 surrendered to US forces after the Germany's fall - but the US had to face the very real possibility that there had been other submarines that may not have surrendered. I guess my point is that you can't divorce the reality of the situation from the perception of the decision makers at the time. With some risk of attracting flames, some believe the same applies to the run-up to the Iraq war.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
problem is that would only work for twenty five minutes or so, then you've only released a few and after the first one hits the USSR you'd get thousands in return. Preemptive first strike has to be very massive and totally debilitating.
> All propaganda to the contrary, the dislike and distrust of the US is not markedly different now than it was 23 years ago.
This is modded insightful? What nonsense.
23 years ago the Soviet Bloc was extremely distrustful of the US - the possibility of imminent nuclear annihilation has a way of doing that, especially when you're already living in a ruthless totalitarian machine - but much of the rest of the world regarded the United States as a democratic bastion protecting them from the Soviet empire. Western Europe, in particular, was totally reliant on the US for protection from the massive Russian ground army. Furthermore, the US was genuinely viewed as a (relative) beacon of democracy and human rights in comparison to the ruthless and inhumane Soviet countries.
Today Western Europe views the United States as the biggest threat to world peace, as does much of the rest of the world. There are stats about this, I can find them if I have to. The US has also lost its role as the leader of the democratic and human rights-aware world, and continues to decline on those fronts at an alarming rate (especially the latter).
I think I speak for a lot of non-US citizens when I say that it is a tragedy that America cannot be relied upon to do the right thing, even on paper. In my opinion a hell of a lot of anti-American sentiment stems from people who depserately want the US to truly lead, and are appalled at the way it is actually behaving.
Put it another way - 23 years ago citizens of Britan, Australia, and Western Europe would never have seriously felt that they might be 'disappeared' by US intelligence agencies from a third-party country, tortured, detained for years without any recourse to the law, and eventually tried in an extra-judicial process with the possibility of the death penalty. Today that has in fact happened, and continues to happen if President Bush is to be believed.
Read Pynchon.
Did you read anything else from the article? The population was ready to revolt, and half of the military and civilian government were dead-set against continuing the war. They tried to establish diplomatic ties with Russia to save their country and avoid invasion; the US demanded unconditional surrender, the Japanese not surprisingly said "pass", but KEPT WORKING ON HOW TO END THE WAR. Christ, man! Read the article.
US history books make it out like they were rabid, crazed defenders of their almighty emperor that would have fought to the last man, and that our atomic bombs "shocked" them back to "reason" and "saved lives". It's all a blatant lie.
Please help metamoderate.