by “Threatening Armageddon”
“We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival” -
Jonathan Schell (American author)
The terrifying film ‘The man who saved the world’ has been showing in London. Stanislaw Petrov, who appears himself in the film, was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Russian early warning system when the electronic alarms blared deafeningly and insistently in his command centre. All checks confirmed that there was no malfunction. They confirmed a nuclear attack from the US was on its way. It was not possible to wait for radar confirmation of the incoming ballistic missiles because by that time it would be too late to retaliate. Petrov knew that if he reported the alarm to the high command they would immediately order a retaliatory strike1 initiating a global nuclear war and the end of most of the human race. On his own imitative he decided that he did not trust the computers and did nothing.
The author Steve Taylor, in his book ‘The Fall’, expresses the view that the human race became, to a significant degree, insane about six thousand years ago when we introduced warfare as a way of ‘solving’ disputes. It is difficult to deny that it is insane to set up a system in which it is down to the humanity of one man to save the planet. The insanity is compounded when we realise that, rather than learning from the past, we have perpetuated the same mad system. We even call it MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).
Over a thousand nuclear weapons are held, right now, ready for launch at the press of a button. Missiles travel at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour so we are entirely dependent on computers to warn of an attack. We know that computers malfunction. But those manning the early warning centres are rigorously