Despite all the concern about global warming, the greatest threat to humanity is still its huge nuclear arsenals.
Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in one of the Soviet intelligence services' military intelligence units, reluctantly sat down in the command chair of an underground early warning system bunker south of Moscow.
He had a day off, but his partner fell ill, and Petrov was summoned to the service at the last moment.
Before him, screens glowed with pictures of underground missile silos scattered across the prairies of the American Midwest. These images were transmitted from reconnaissance satellites flying high above the Earth.
Petrov and his subordinates watched and listened, trying to notice any sign of movement, any unusual phenomenon that indicated that the United States of America was carrying out a nuclear attack.
This was the peak of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA. The parties had powerful arsenals to strike - hundreds of missiles and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of wiping out the enemy from the face of the earth.
It was a game of nerves, a game of bluffs and counter bluffs. Who will hit first? Will the other side have a chance to strike back?
The time for an intercontinental ballistic missile to fly from US territory to the USSR and in the opposite direction is approximately 12 minutes. If the Cold War turned into a hot one, every second would be important for saving life.
Everything depended on instant decisions. But while Petrov was thinking about how to live another boring night when absolutely nothing happens.
It all happened suddenly. The light alarm flashed, bright red letters on a white background flashed - "START, START". The siren blared deafeningly. The computer showed Petrov that the United States had just started a war.
He turned pale. Cold sweat ran down my back. However, the officer acted in cold blood. The computer detected missile launches, but the dim screens showed no danger. There were no characteristic flashes and plumes of fire from missiles flying out of the mines into the sky. Could it be a computer malfunction and not a nuclear Armageddon?
Instead of sounding the alarm that would make Soviet missiles ready to retaliate in minutes, Petrov decided to wait.
The warning lights flashed again - a second rocket must have taken off. Then the third. Now the computer literally shouted: "A missile strike is imminent!"
But that was kind of nonsense. The computer seemed to have detected three, then four, now five missiles, but this number was still incongruously small. According to the basic provisions of the Cold War doctrine, if one of the parties launches a preemptive nuclear missile strike, then it must be a massive launch of missiles of crushing power, and not such a thin trickle.
Petrov reasoned sensibly. This must be a mistake.
What if not? What if, right before his eyes, the terrible catastrophe that the world has feared from the very moment the first nuclear bombs fell on Japan in 1945 - and he does nothing?
There was not long to wait, he would soon find out. Petrov spent the next ten minutes in a cold sweat, counting the time of the missiles' arrival to Moscow. But there was no bright flash or explosion 150 times more powerful than Hiroshima. Instead, the siren went off and the warning board went out.
The September 26, 1983 alarm turned out to be false. Later they found out that the satellite's sensors mistook ordinary clouds at high altitude for flying rockets.
The world was saved thanks to Petrov's composure.
But he received no thanks. He was dismissed from office, taken out of the state, and then quietly retired. What he experienced that night became a great embarrassment for the Soviet Union.
Petrov may have averted an all-out nuclear war, but he also exposed the flaws of Moscow's vaunted early warning shield.
Instead of feeling relieved, his high-ranking officials in the Kremlin were terrified. They became paranoid, they were afraid that Ronald Reagan was preparing the first nuclear missile strike in Washington, which would wipe them off the face of the earth.
The year was 1983. And as vividly shown in the documentary, which will air this coming weekend on Channel 4, the next month and a half was the most dangerous period of time the world has experienced in its history.
The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in 1962 on the brink of a world war, when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev entered a violent conflict over missiles in Cuba, is well known to everyone. Those events took place openly, in front of the public. But the 1983 crisis unfolded behind closed doors, in a world of spies and secrets.
A quarter of a century later, the gruff and aged veterans of the Soviet secret service, the KGB, and their sleeker CIA colleagues stepped out of the shadows and told everything about what happened then. The story is frightening. Each for their part, they realized the gravity of the situation.
"We were ready for a third world war," said Captain Viktor Tkachenko, who commanded the Soviet missile base at the time, "if the United States had unleashed it."
Robert Gates, who was the CIA's deputy director of intelligence at the time, later headed the agency and is now Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush government, recalls: "We could have been on the brink of war without knowing it."
In that distant 1983, the world lived as usual, unaware of the catastrophe before which it is facing.
Margaret Thatcher became prime minister for the second time, and her potential successor Cecil Parkinson (Cecil Parkinson) was forced to resign from his post, admitting that he is raising a son from his secretary, with whom he is in love. Two young socialist troublemakers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, become members of parliament for the first time.
Police are counting the bodies of the victims of serial killer Dennis Nilsen in his London apartment, and a six-man gang is removing £ 25 million worth of gold from the Brinks Mat warehouse. Find "Hitler's diary", which turns out to be a fake.
English footballers do not qualify for the European Championship final.
Everybody sings Sting's song "Every Breath You Take", which has these words: "I follow your every breath, every step you take." Quite unwittingly, Sting very accurately noticed what the Russians and Americans were doing on the international arena.
Both sides have new, more powerful and more effective weapons of destruction. The Soviets are deploying their SS-20 missiles on mobile launchers that are easy to hide and nearly impossible to detect.
Meanwhile, the Americans are beginning to deploy their Pershing-2 ballistic missiles in Western Europe, preparing a direct response to a potential invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact (this is how the alliance of the Soviet Union and its satellites behind the Iron Curtain was called).
They also deploy cruise missiles, which, flying low above the ground, must pass unnoticed through radar obstacles.
Reagan, who replaces Jimmy Carter in the White House, is raising the ante in this dangerous game with a provocative speech in which he calls the Soviet Union an "evil empire."
His animosity confuses new Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a hard-line communist and former KGB chief whose understandably suspicious nature is further deteriorated by serious illness. For almost the entire duration of the crisis, he was in a hospital bed, chained to an artificial kidney apparatus.
His conviction that Reagan was up to something was reinforced by the president's announcement that the Star Wars project had begun. This multi-trillion dollar system was supposed to protect the United States from enemy ICBMs by shooting them down in space before they entered the atmosphere at their final trajectory.
Reagan saw this as a purely defensive measure, but the Russians thought the program was aggressive in design. They believed that such a system could destroy their nuclear weapons one by one, leaving the USSR defenseless.
Even more convinced of Washington's malicious machinations, Andropov launched Operation Ryan, in which KGB agents scattered around the world were instructed to send to the center any information indicating the preparation of a US nuclear attack on the USSR.
KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who worked under diplomatic "cover" at the Soviet embassy in London, was ordered to monitor signs that the British were secretly stockpiling food, fuel and blood plasma.
At the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka, every smallest detail was entered into a journal, filling it with words until a whole mountain of "evidence" had accumulated. But, as one American observer pointed out, the problem was that the KGB, which was adept at obtaining information, was powerless to analyze it.
In reality, the dossier compiled by him was just an extremely cunning and dishonest move, and the collected "information" was dangerously closed. This dossier once again showed the recklessness and riskiness of adjusting the facts in military matters to the already established preconceived notions.
Tensions between East and West escalated when a plane flew into Soviet airspace over the Bering Sea without permission, ignoring all radio signals and warnings. On alarm, Su-14 interceptors were raised into the sky, which shot down it, since the command believed it was an American spy plane.
But it turned out to be a civilian aircraft of Korean Airlines Flight KA-007, which went off course on its way from Alaska to Seoul.
All 269 passengers and crew members were killed. Reagan again accused the "evil empire" and Moscow again heard the drumbeat of war in his words.
And then the events began that almost led to the disaster. On November 2, 1983, the North Atlantic Alliance of Western countries, led by the United States, began a planned ten-day exercise, code-named Operation Able Archer, to test its military communications systems in case of war.
The scenario of the exercise included a Soviet invasion using conventional weapons, which the West was unable to stop.
The decisive moment was to come with the imitation of the launch of nuclear missiles. Command posts and missile bases were on full alert, however, as was repeatedly reported to the Soviet leadership, no real weapons were used.
In every message to the Soviet leadership, it was announced in huge letters that these were "ONLY DOCTRINES". But it, fearing Reagan's alleged recklessness, preferred not to believe these reports. Andropov, who was in a hospital bed, and his Kremlin advisers were seized not only by a new attack of paranoia, but also by long-standing fears.
This was the generation of the Second World War, forever remembering how Hitler deceived Stalin and began in 1940, under the pretext of conducting exercises, the bloody Operation Barbarossa (he conducted it in 1941 - approx. Transl.) Against the Soviet Union.
In the course of this war, 25 million Soviet citizens died, and the Soviet country nearly collapsed. Letting history repeat itself would be unforgivable.
And now the Kremlin watched and listened in horror as the West conducted its exercises. Gordievsky and other KGB station officers around the world received urgent "lightning" telegrams demanding evidence that the exercises were a cover for a real preemptive nuclear strike.
But Washington was completely unaware of the powerful effect the Skillful Archer had on the Soviet leadership. In fact, Reagan did not prepare for war, but did the opposite.
At his presidential residence, Camp David, Maryland, he recently watched the television version of the science fiction film The Next Day, which chronicles the aftermath of a nuclear war.
The former Hollywood cowboy was more impressed by this film than all the military briefings and reports. The film predicted the deaths of 150 million people. Reagan wrote in his diary: "He made a strong depressing impression on me. We must do everything possible to ensure that a nuclear war never occurs."
The old warhorse changed course, and he soon began trying to forge friendly relations with Moscow, which led to his first visit to the Soviet Union, to forge bilateral relations and to ease tensions between East and West.
But Reagan almost missed his chance. As the teachings reached their peak, the Kremlin's paranoia also culminated. During the exercise, Western forces nearly fired a theoretical salvo of 350 nuclear missiles.
The military of the Soviet Union brought the nuclear forces to the state of the highest combat readiness, when it remained only to press a button to launch a massive retaliatory strike.
The pilots of the Soviet nuclear bombers sat in the cockpits of their planes, whose engines were idling, awaiting the command to take off. Three hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles were ready to be fired, and 75 SS-20 mobile units rushed to their secret positions.
Ships of the Soviet navy hid in shelters, anchored off the cliffs of the Baltic, while nuclear submarines with their arsenals of missiles cruised under the ice of the Atlantic and prepared for missile launches.
The situation was saved by two spies, one on each side. The KGB man in London, Gordievsky was actually a double agent working for British intelligence. He warned MI5 and the CIA that the Skillful Archer exercise caused a dangerous mood in the Soviet leadership.
For the first time, the West began to understand the panic in which the Soviets were following his teachings, and the Americans reacted instantly, reducing the intensity of passions. Reagan then made a showcase overseas visit, signaling to the Soviets that he now has more important things to do.
Meanwhile, the East German spy Topaz (his real name is Rainer Rupp), who has penetrated deep into the NATO hierarchy of the highest level and had access to many secrets of the alliance, received an urgent request from Moscow to confirm the fact that the West is starting a war.
Deeply embedded Topaz could know everything for sure. All he had to do was dial the desired phone number to confirm the concerns of his owners. But he did not call. His message in reply was that NATO was not planning anything like that.
Moscow took a step back from the edge of the abyss that it had fallen on because of its fevered imagination. Meanwhile, the exercises came to an end, the imitation ended, and the participants left. It was November 11 - the Day of Remembrance for all those killed in the war.
Only later did the West realize how close the world had come to the apocalypse. Reagan and his advisers were shocked, and more efforts began to find ways to end the arms race against the Soviet Union.
What nearly happened in 1983 has long been known to Cold War historians. But the new documentary will introduce those events to a wider audience.
Today, the West has tense relations with post-communist Russia and its aggressive leader Vladimir Putin. Bombers and reconnaissance aircraft fly dangerously close to the airspace of rival countries, testing their nerves, as they did in the early 1980s. Misunderstanding can happen at any moment.
Those events 24 years ago remind us that despite all the concern about global warming, the greatest threat to humanity is still its huge nuclear arsenals.
Another event this year went unnoticed, but amid growing concerns over nuclear proliferation, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have moved their Doomsday clock forward, setting it five minutes before midnight. The clock is now closer to nuclear disaster than ever since the 1983 false alarm.
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("Asia Times", Hong Kong)
("The New York Times", USA)
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign mass media and do not reflect the position of the Inosmi editorial board.
The man who prevented the war
In the Soviet Union, a campaign for order and discipline has been declared, proclaimed by a gloomy man with a cold gleam of eyes - General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Yuri Andropov. Restaurants, baths, cinemas are subjected to total checks: employees of the "authorities" checking documents, persistently ask: "Why are you here during working hours?" Answers are checked, truants are identified. There are jokes about the thirty-seventh year ...
However, Yuri Vladimirovich was no stranger to sentimentality. He allowed himself liberal reasoning and, they say, was even lenient towards dissidents. As the leader of the USSR, Andropov demonstrated his peacefulness in every possible way. Having received a letter from American schoolgirl Samantha Smith (“... why do you want to conquer the world, or at least our country”), he replied: “We do not want anything like this. No one in our country - neither workers and peasants, nor writers and doctors, nor adults and children, nor members of the government, wants neither a big nor a "small" war ... "
Nevertheless, the world fire almost broke out, but it was prevented by Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. While on alert, the officer received a message about the launch of missiles from an American base towards the USSR. However, after analyzing the situation, Petrov realized that the warning system had malfunctioned. But this happened at the very peak of the Cold War, a few days after a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean passenger plane that had invaded Soviet airspace ...
Many years later, at the UN headquarters in New York, Petrov will be presented with an international award - a crystal statuette with the inscription: "The man who prevented a nuclear war."
S. Vrazhek
— Müller and Bormann are sitting in the pub. - Now Stirlitz will enter, - said Müller, - will tell the password: "One beer and two sausages." And here we cx ... Müller and Bormann are sitting in the pub. - Now Stirlitz will enter, - said Müller, - will tell the password: "One beer and two sausages." And here we will grab him. Stirlitz enters. - Give me one beer ... no sausages! he says, turning to Müller and Bormann, and sticks out his tongue at them.
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— Two girls were sitting in the yard, playing cards, and next to the house there was a bush and a swamp. It got dark in the yard, and two guys came out from behind the house and approached the house ... Two girls were sitting in the yard, playing cards, and next to the house there was a bush and a swamp. It got dark in the yard, and two guys came out from behind the house and approached the girls. “Let's play cards together,” one suggested. “Come on, come on,” one girl agreed. And the other quietly says to her: - Remember, our neighbor told us: don't talk to those who leave the house. I won't play with them, I'll go home. - Come on, stay. We'll just play with them. They won't do anything to us. The girl persuaded her friend. She stayed. They played and played. Suddenly a six of Vinay fell at the youngest, the one who wanted to leave. She bent down to pick her up and saw that the guys had long, hairy legs. She screamed, ran home, called people, the police. They come up to the bench on which they were sitting, and under it is a girl, torn in half, there are no guys, and there are two pillars at the bench, on one of them there is a note written in blood.
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At 6.24 Far East time, the target violating the air borders of the USSR disappeared from the air defense radar screens. A new round of the Cold War has begun. The attack on the "defenseless" civilian aircraft by Soviet fighters caused a storm of indignation throughout the world and allowed the Soviet state to be accused of hostility. The troops of the two superpowers are being put on alert. The fleets of the USSR, USA and Japan rush to the place of the tragedy. And in the latter they announce an alert collection in the national air force.
In the Western press, the reason for the violation of the USSR borders in the Far East by Boeing flight 007 was explained by experts as the result of an error in entering data into the on-board computer. At the same time, no one could say how this aircraft, equipped at that time with the most advanced control and navigation facilities, operated by an experienced pilot and controlled by dispatchers of several countries, deviated from its course by almost 500 kilometers. After all, it is simply unthinkable for specialists not to notice such a significant departure from the established flight path within 2.5 hours. As a result, the intruder aircraft flew over the most important Soviet military installations in Kamchatka, the Far East and the southern part of Sakhalin. It was also obvious that the Boeing 707 was trying to get away from the air defense fighters by changing the speed, altitude and direction of flight. However, for some reason, the authorities and specialists in the United States did not notice all this and unleashed a literal information war against the USSR, accusing them of deliberately destroying a civilian liner and its passengers along with the crew. The "black boxes" of the downed liner could help to find out the truth. In the Tatar Strait, spearfishing begins for the remains of the downed Boeing.
As General of the Army Anatoly Kornukov said, the American divers were sent away from the crash site by dropping two beacons into the sea, which imitated the signals of the "black boxes". They "fell for this duck." Therefore, the Soviet divers were the first at the bottom near the wreckage of the Boeing. Before the dive, our submariners were preparing for a terrible sight. At the bottom of the sea there were supposed to be 269 victims of the tragedy - men, women, children. And they found about 30 bodies of the dead. The wreckage of the liner turned out to be very small. Their scatter on the seabed clearly showed that the destruction of the hull of a huge aircraft occurred as a result of a powerful explosion, which simply could not occur after hitting the water of the padded liner. Usually, after such air crashes, large fragments of the fuselage, equipment, wings are found at the bottom.
“With regard to the Boeing passengers, I am absolutely convinced that they were not on the liner,” General of the Army Anatoly Kornukov said, “the remains of such a large number of the dead could not disappear instantly, having dissolved in sea water. Big Sakhalin crabs have nothing to do with it either. And the underwater currents could not quickly scatter the remains of such a large number of dead over great distances. "
The other day a report was declassified, from which it follows that in November 1983 the United States and the USSR were dangerously close to a nuclear war, writes The Business Insider. The February 1990 report was declassified by the National Security Archives (George Washington University, USA), after 12 years, according to columnist Armin Rosen.
The report also shows that the US national security apparatus missed many worrying symptoms.
In 1983, the USSR regarded a major US exercise called The Skillful Archer as part of NATO's preparations for real war. The USSR mobilized its army. But was Moscow ready to strike first?
The declassified report partially answers these questions. His findings are creepy even after 32 years, the author writes.
“It turns out that the USSR decided that the United States intended to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. The United States fell into the opposite mistake: they did not believe that the USSR was preparing for war in earnest,” the article says. During The Able Archer, the American military and intelligence officers did not even know that something extraordinary was happening.
In the early 1980s, "Soviet analysts concluded that the United States intended [new generations of ballistic missiles] to develop first-strike forces," the publication cites the report. Perhaps the USSR also "felt that NATO's decision to deploy 600 Pershing II and cruise missiles was not a counterbalance to Soviet [medium-range] SS-20 missiles, but another step towards first strike capability."
"The KGB officers in [Moscow] shared the opinion that the United States might be the first to strike a nuclear strike if it achieves a combined power that significantly exceeds that of the USSR. And many agreed that this was going to happen," the report says.
In fact, the United States did not even consider the idea of \u200b\u200ba first strike, the newspaper writes.
The report describes a Soviet computer that calculated the power of the USSR relative to the United States using thousands of variables. "According to some reports, the Soviet leadership was ready to think about a preemptive nuclear strike if the computer detects that the power of the USSR is 40% or more inferior to the American one. In some moments on the eve of The Skillful Archer, this figure reached 45%," the article says.
The USSR also calculated that, thanks to the buildup of its missile forces, the United States would destroy the USSR's nuclear potential at the first strike, and a retaliatory strike would soon be ineffective or even impossible.
"The Soviet leaders fell into paranoia, realizing that the balance of power that fully predetermined their country's strategic approach would soon become a thing of the past," the author writes.
This is the atmosphere in which the Skill Shooter began in November 1983. Tens of thousands of American troops were deployed to Central Europe. The report also said: "We have heard that some American aircraft have practiced working with nuclear warheads, including leaving hangars with realistic dummy warheads."
In response, the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries, among other things, "transported nuclear weapons by helicopters from warehouses to the units responsible for delivering them to the target," from November 4 to 10, all flights were suspended, except for reconnaissance aircraft - "it is likely that have as many aircraft as possible for combat, "the report said.
But the United States did not even notice that the USSR was seriously preparing for a possible nuclear war. The US President was not informed about this. The military did not change the defensive doctrine, the US intelligence misinterpreted the actions of the USSR.
Lieutenant General Leonard Perruts, then deputy chief of staff for the US Air Force in Europe, did nothing to change the readiness level of the US forces. The author explains that Perruts did not receive any intelligence that the mobilization in the USSR was provoked by fear of a preemptive nuclear strike.
The report described Perruts' inaction as "a fluke despite being poorly informed." "If US troops changed their operating procedures in Eastern Europe [sic. - Ed. Note], it would only exacerbate tensions and increase the likelihood of an inadvertent outbreak of war," the article says.
The superpowers have created a situation in which inaction has inadvertently turned out to be a courageous act that may have saved earthly civilization, the publication concludes.