Interesting tidbit: when I describe my Soviet and early post-Soviet childhood to Americans, Americans of my age are surprised that their fears of Soviet nuclear attack, civil defense training ("duck and cover"), were not unique. "Whoa, you thought we were going to nuke you?! We thought you were going to nuke us." A popular (not very politically correct by US standards!) Soviet joke of this time conveyed the cynicism around the idea that once a nuclear war began, humanity would have any hope--
The thread is two years old, but it is a start. Let me know if you have any luck. BTW, someone in the Reddit thread points out that cash sent through the mail _will_ be stolen, so if anyone wanted to send him money, we'd have to me more clever about it.
Yes, when I first read the story I was kind of scared when thinking what could happen if he would just think "my duty is to pass the warning, higher ups would sort it out". Now of course everybody says "we'd caught it up anyway", but who knows what would actually happen.
Oh look, another title edit that adds nothing and takes away from the original title that actually told us why we should care about Vasili Arkhipov. Get it together, mods!
It's a lonely and sad thought that the biggest heroes whose immense sacrifices and contributions to the well being of everyone around them are celebrated by... the blissful ignorance of everyone else.
Except in movies. There, we get to see and experience it all.
> Except in movies. There, we get to see and experience it all.
Well, movies often get the facts and the characters wrong (on purpose). Movies usually are adapted to fit to audiences who have no real understanding of History so things are made simple for them.
This being said, K-19 was a decent movie (despite the inaccuracies) and I'd recommend anyone to watch it AND read what actually happened.
Like pretty much any superhero movie, no one knows who spiderman or Clark Kent are. In the first spiderman movie, at the very end he "gets the girl" but has to walk away from her, because of his obligation to help the world and keep the girl out of trouble. So his sacrifice is known by the movie audience, but not the in-movie characters.
It still is. Most nations' Commanders in Chief (i.e. the Presidents) have the power to order a nuke launch by themselves. Of course they have advisers and so on, but that does not mean they have less of a power.
Interesting factoid: The US made it's PAL (permissive access link) technology available to other nuclear powers, including enemies in order that they could secure their weapons against unauthorized use.
I was lucky enough to learn about this in high school - Andover. I forget the speakers name but he gave the speech between 2001 - 2005 (I can't remember). It was an incredible speech about Mutually Assured Destruction and how the theory was absurd. The speaker pointed out that no one thought that we would exit the Cold War without a horrible war. And then he asked, "Why did this not happen?" He pointed to Vasili's example as to how one SANE person can make a difference. He talked about several other examples. He ended the speech by repeating, "PEACE. PEACE. PEACE." At the moment I thought it was cheesy... but here I am more than 10 years later and I still remember it.
It's a shame that we have gotten ourselves to a point where we must rely on the level headed decision making of so few people to keep us from annihilation. To say 'saved' may be a bit premature. It's more of a shame that we have created such monstrosities with the gifts of technology and have kept them around and continue to threaten our very own existence with them. Here's to hoping for cooler heads and compassion to always prevail, for all our sakes.
"Three officers on board the submarine [...] were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch."
Opportunity for a playwright to write a really tight two scene piece there. Doubt if we could get it up to 50,000 words[1] even if we did the 'follow three scenarios with multiple endings' trick, and even if we had the Bobby Kennedy/LBJ dynamic in the committee going.
Edit: The K-19 'incident' would have made a major psychological impression on anyone, even allowing for the high threshold that I imagine Soviet navy commanders of that era had.[2]
Well, I'm glad the worst is over. It's chilling how many near misses there were. How many more near misses might we have endured, had the Cold War gone on, before the one not-any-kind-of-miss that would have destroyed human civilization?
I've been reading a lot of Bamford lately for obvious reasons. Apparently, the CIA, NSA, and Chair Force were quite provocative during the Cold War. Something like twenty US aircraft were shot down by the Soviets (over Soviet airspace).
I find it amazing the US officials thought it a good idea to drop small (trainer) explosives on a nuclear armed USSR sub during one of the tensest standoffs of the Cold War.
Is it only in retrospect that this seems poorly thought through?
They didn't just do it for sport, they tried to get it to surface and there aren't that many way to talk to a submarine that doesn't want to be found and is too deep to hear radio communications. They wanted the sub to surface, probably to enforce the blockade over Cuba. The captain of the sub erroneously decided that they're being attacked, because he had no communications with outside and didn't know what's going on. Arkhipov persuaded him not to rush and surface, and find out what's going on before firing.
An essay in the book What Ifs? of American History (Robert Cowley, ed.) by Robert L. O'Connell, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust," details what might have happened if Arkhipov had not been successful and the Randolph had in fact been hit by a nuclear torpedo.
In the aftermath, the U.S. military executes air strikes on Cuba followed by an invasion. The Soviet forces obliterate Guantanamo with a nuclear strike, send nuclear cruise missiles at the incoming invasion force,and, most seriously, manage to launch two of the SS-4 missiles...one of which hits Washington D.C. and wipes out the entire National Command Authority. In response, U.S. forces execute the entire SIOP against the Soviet Union, an effort which gives "overkill" a new name.
The aftermath of "The Two Days' War" includes the near-extermination of the Soviet Union, radiation issues in large parts of the world, and a "nuclear twilight" causing worldwide food shortages and famine. Ultimately, the United States was viewed as the aggressor by the rest of the world, compounded by the actions of President Richard Nixon (elected in 1964, replacing Acting President John McCormack). The U.S. stood alone in refusing to join the Geneva Convention for the Abolition of Nuclear Armaments in 1966, and renounced UN membership in 1968, ordering the organization out of New York City. The American public felt Nixon had taken the wrong turn, and elected Eugene McCarthy to succeed him in 1972.
The essay is written as the report of an investigative commission written in 1972 and finally declassified in 2002, in part by the actions of U.S. Archivist Newton Leroy Gingrich (who never went into politics in this timeline) at the New Capital District in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It can't be off-topic shit if it is within the topic guidelines set by the site, by definition. You could always go away and run your own site if you think the attitude of the mods and community here are worthy of shame.
No, not directly, but don't you just like 'hacking' the possible futures that could have arisen from that discussion among the three men in a tin can? Games theoretic approaches to what they could have known under the sea with failing air supplies?
Armenian Radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan_jokes) was asked: "what do to if a nuclear attack is imminent?"
Armenian Radio responded: "wrap yourself in a linen sheet and slowly, in organized fashion, without creating any panic, crawl to a cemetery."
To paraphrase War Games (a classic which I watched only after coming to the US), the winning move is not to play."