#Stanislav Petrov

[earlgraytay]

...It's a bit late for this, but I would like to propose a Thanksgiving alternative, for anyone who feels uncomfortable celebrating Thanksgiving but does not want to jettison one of the very few holidays that everyone gets by default without religious connotations.

Vasily Arkhipov Day.

Vasily Arkhipov Day is currently in late October, but the Cuban Missile Crisis ended on November 20th. if one celebrates Vasily Arkhipov Day on the first Thursday after the 20th of November, that lines up with the current days off most people have pretty well.

Vasily Arkhipov was a Soviet Commodore who successfully argued against launching a nuclear attack on the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His cool head in a crisis, powers of persuasion, and unwillingness to jeopardize humanity's future averted a nuclear war. He appears to have been a stand-up guy in his personal life, as much as any historical person can be, and ... y'know... actively saved the world.

You have your feast, you have your parade, you have your sports game. You have your moment of quiet reflection/thankfulness if you want one, you have a narrative to share that reflects cultural ideals that you actively want to reflect. "We survived despite it all, let's eat" is a good basis for a holiday, and it's one you can feel good about celebrating.

I don't have any strong feelings about Thanksgiving either way- it just wasn't a big deal for my family growing up- but if you are uncomfortable with your current excuse to celebrate and want to have a celebration anyway, here's one that might work.

[madame-helen]

[colorfuldonutrunaway]

I should probably explain a lil bit about the world of my main OCs (Fox, Wolf, Fang, Bone) real quick.

So, Fox and Wolf are two scientists from a dimension that's very similar to ours. Has the internet, modern technology, etc.

This dimension is known as 5b.

(This picture is not mine, if someone finds the original photo taker that would be great)

On the other hand, Fang and Bone are from dimension 5a: A post-apocalyptic world that experienced a nuclear holocaust in 1983. Most world countries have collapsed, the environment is irradiated, and most of society in the United States live in underground bunkers.

(This pic is mine, AI generated by Imagine.)

So you might be wondering: Why did this event happen in 1983? This is based on a real-life event: Oko, a missile detection system in the Soviet Union, falsely detected missiles from the US heading to Russia. Stanislav Petrov, the man on duty at the time, ignored the warning from the system, potentially saving the world from WW3. Had he responded, the Soviet Union would have 'retaliated' by shooting missiles back in return.

That's the difference between 5a and 5b. 5a is the result of Stanislav Petrov believing the warning to be legit and convincing command to strike back immediately, causing a nuclear exchange that destroyed civilization. 5b is just like our real life world: he ignored the warning and the world exists like it does today.

I'll go into more detail in the future on the major differences between each world, Anarchy City, and how the countries of the world fare in 5a.

[landoverwater]

Thinking of Stanislav Petrov today, and the debt of gratitude we all owe him.

For my generation, the most terrifying thing during our early years was the threat of nuclear war, and accidents from nuclear power plants.

I had no idea how close we actually came to the former until I learned about Stanislav in recent years.

[victusinveritas]

[monkey-network]

Honestly, a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer could seriously work if you account the Cold War, the KAL007 incident, and Stanislav Petrov being the guy who stopped the possible nuclear war. Building it from the destroyer of the world to the savior of the world.

[geekwriter]

One man in Russia, Stanislav Petrov, saved the world from a nuclear war in 1983. I was 13 years old, unaware of how close my life came to changing or ending. The article is a sobering reminder of just how fragile our existence is. https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union

[spider-artdump]

[nooralsibai]

Scientists Say We're Closer to Nuclear Armageddon Than Any Other Point in History 

Story by Noor Al-Sibai

Image credit: Mark Stevenson/UIG via Getty / Futurism Original published by Futurism on January 24, 2023. 

Black Pilled

The scientist-activists who run the Doomsday Clock have once again ticked it forward, bringing humanity's estimated chances of its own nuclear annihilation closer than ever.

A statement published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group behind the Doomsday Clock, cited Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the potential for a "hot war" between NATO and Russia as its reasoning for moving the clock a mere 90 seconds to midnight.

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and the scientists who would have been his colleagues had the US granted him security clearance to work on the atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, the BAS has every year since 1947 warned of the preceding annum's biggest risks to humanity — and this year, those risks are all about Russia.

"Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict — by accident, intention, or miscalculation — is a terrible risk," the statement reads. "The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high."

Hot War

While not mentioned in the statement, the country formerly known as the Soviet Union has some pretty jarring past precedents to take into consideration: the 1983 "false alarm" incident in which USSR radar picked up and subsequently alerted officials about phony readings from the West that were initially interpreted as warhead-carrying spy planes coming out of the US.

The protocol, which wasn't followed, would have been to strike back. If Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet Air Defense officer in charge of the early-warning station located that detected the misinterpreted signals, hadn't trusted his gut when it told him they were false alarms, nuclear war would almost certainly have broken out.

Back in the present, the concerned scientists note that beyond just the heating up of the new cold war, Russia's Ukrainian aggression has also "undermine[d] global efforts to combat climate change," and its fake news about Ukraine developing bioweapons may indicate that it's doing exactly that.

While "there is no clear pathway for forging a just peace that discourages future aggression under the shadow of nuclear weapons," the BAS urged open engagement with peace talks between NATO and Russia — not just for the sake of heading off war, but for the sake of helping the planet avoid further catastrophe, too.

More on nukes: New Study Shows Where You Should Hide To Survive A Nuclear Attack

[filosofablogger]

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Yesterday was International Day For The Total Elimination Of Nuclear Weapons.  No, I am not making this up and yes, I am serious. Following the High-level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament held at the United Nations on 26 September 2013, the General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/68/32 calling for “the urgent commencement of negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament for the early conclusion…

[neutrallyobsessed]

a lil silly thing bout my fanclones?? Unbelievable!!

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

I've only ever seen 'you get to kill one person as a baby' alternative history polls, but I think there's a more interesting version so let's play 'change one event in history'! (Go for what you think would do the most good or what would be the most chaotic choice. It's a thought experiment we're not the morals police!)

Very brief (and grossly oversimplified!) explanations under the cut.

unfortunately my education has been very eurocentric and I'm pretty hopeless at the nuances of history pre-19th century; this is as diverse as i could make it (which is not very diverse at all). Please feel free to add in the tags!

1) This assassination set WW1 in motion (triggered/enabled the first declaration of war)

2) Emmanuel de Grouchy was a general in Napoléon's army. Before the Battle of Waterloo he'd been given the order to cut off the Prussian General Blücher, but Blücher had already got to the battlefield so de Grouchy went off on a pointless search with his 40-50k soldiers instead of joining the battle, which many consider a significant reason for Napoléon's defeat.

3) i.e., make trouble after Columbus leaves for America but before he arrives there.

4) Georg Elser attempted to set off a bomb during a Hitler speech at a beer hall. (There were other attempts on Hitler's life both before and after this, I just picked this one). The explosion failed to kill Hitler as he had moved his speech up half an hour and was gone by the time the bomb went off. It killed seven Nazis and a waitress. Elser was arrested, sent to a concentration camp and murdered days before its liberation at the end of the war. This has nothing to do with the question, I just hate that everyone only knows about the Stauffenberg one.

5) This position allowed Stalin to pick functionaries for key positions in the Soviet Union and thus pave his way to becoming Lenin's successor.

6) likely preventing the USA from creating a functional atomic bomb before the end of the war.

7) Günter Schabowski held the famous press conference which communicated the GDR's intention to allow East German citizens to cross into West Germany again without having to apply for government permission. Asked when this would come into effect, Schabowski replied, visibly uncertain, "to my knowledge, that is immediately. Right away". This led to crowds overwhelming the Berlin border crossings. The officers stationed there had received orders to mark the passports of all those crossing with a stamp that would barr them from re-entry into the GDR, but did not uphold this and instead simply opened the barrier as they feared violence would break out. This became the night the Berlin Wall fell.

8) The battle was a huge deal for German propaganda both at the time and later on and made especially Hindenburg a war hero, but I mostly picked it because I figure it'd be easiest to get them both at once during a battle. Both men were central to the decisions the German Empire made in WW1 (to such a degree that people have argued they effectively led the country) and both played a role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power: Ludendorff lent his credibility and fame to Hitler's Munich Beer Hall putsch in 1922, and Hindenburg went on to become the last president of Weimar Germany and appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933.

[aiiaiiiyo]

[brutish-impulse]

Nena is an optimist. It could take way less than 99 red balloons.

It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds above North Dakota and the Molniya orbits of the satellites, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.

From Stanislav Petrov's wikipedia page.

[comicsansstein]

Happy Stanislav Petrov day