Well said. I would add, according to this book, http://www.amazon.com/Big-Red-Trident-Nuclear-Submarine/dp/B000H2MI38/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317048531&sr=1-1, SSBN (U.S. nuclear-missile submarine) commanders have, since the end of the Cold War, been permitted to break radio silence and query Washington as to the authenticity of nuclear launch orders if they come out of the blue and without any preceding rise in international tensions.
Heh. From the picture caption on that page:
I find the use of the term “counter” strange. A nuclear launch might be in response to incoming missiles; it might avenge the launching country; it might retaliate. But (despite Merriam-Webster’s definition including “retaliatory”) to counter an attack, to me, implies some kind of defensive measure to mitigate the damage, which an ICBM launch will not do.
I understand your viewpoint, LSLGuy, but does that mean that you think people like Stanislav Petrov who didn’t follow orders and didn’t fire aren’t heroes?
But wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of what the OP referred to? If it was in a simulator, you would know it was a simulation and everyone would fire.
I was the one who asked about the mindset, thanks for the answer and although I agree to an extent on an intellectual level on an emotional level there’s no way I could ‘push the button’. Though I’d also have moral qualms about participating in the sort of bomber raids that took place regularly in the Second World War. No matter how clean and logical it can be presented I personally would have a problem about participating in an attack which is most likely going to kill a lot civilians.
As for your point about the chain of command, I make it a point to try and not be cynical but the older I get the more I have come to believe that our leaders and ‘superiors’ aren’t actually any smarter or more capable than myself or others, so I’m damn sure going to question an order! (I am not now, nor have I ever been of the military ilk) That doesn’t mean I’d refuse to follow it an order but if it seems unreasonable I don’t think its out of place to question why. Surely one of the reason Western militaries are so effective is because of a certain level of initiative and autonomy throughout the ranks?
I recognise and respect your opinion but when you come right down to it a strategic level exchange is going to kill millions if not billions of people (I’ve never bought the whole ‘destroy the planet and/or humanity’ scenario) and no matter what the geopolitical reality I cannot accept that as a justifiable outcome.
I understand the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and I can understand the rational in utilising tactical nuclear weapons to counter an enemies overwhelming conventional advantage (while recognising that a shedload of civilians are still going to die and be injured) when you get into city-busting multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons it becomes such a large difference in degree as to become a difference in kind. I remember reading a quote by Herman Khan (I believe) where he stated that the step up to thermonuclear weapons from fission weapons was a larger difference of degree than that from conventional to fission bombs.
I’m not a pacifist, I believe the use of force can be justifiable, (and in some circumstances not using force would be the immoral act) but I cannot accept deliberately targeting anothers cities and population is justifiable.
True, he didn’t exactly fill you with confidence!
Correct:
http://www.themovielists.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/500px-WG_042.jpg
http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsS/16301.gif
The historical record is a bit ambiguous as to exactly what Col. Petrov did or didn’t do.
The concensus opinion seems to be that he decided that some early warning system indications of an incoming U.S. raid were false alarms. So he waited for further corraborating evidence from other radar systems before reporting the possible attack up the chain of command. Corraboration which never came because it was indeed a false alarm.
In that sense he may have exceeded whatever his guidance was (“report everything immediately”). Or maybe his role was designed to have exactly that purpose: corraborate & confirm, then notify high command when you have high confidence of an accurate understanding of the situation. We just don’t know.
Regardless of which scenario was true that day, they are very different things from ignoring a valid launch order. At his level there was apparently some legitimate, designed-in, scope for judgment. Which he duly exercised. Out at the sharp end where I lived, by design there is no such scope.
Another nuance: “Checking one’s judgment at the door” as I said above is somewhat conditional. If I have faith that our political & higher military system is sensible, deliberative, & risk-averse I can more readily accept on faith the orders from above. And if my role is to operate some decision-making process I can beleive that it/they are well-designed, well provisioned, and that the other people & systems I depend on are performing their roles reliably.
Conversely, if I believe my superiors are incompetent and risk-aggressive, or I beleive our organization is unreliable, or our decision processes are poor and haphazard or blind, or that the systems & people I rely upon are not reliable or trustworthy, well I’ve got a different situation on my hands. For me personally, that’s when I need to remove myself from the situation by not going into that line of work. For somebody embedded in that situation, they have a much more nuanced problem to solve than I ever faced.
The outcome that day was undoubtedly the right thing. We’ll never know what would have happened had Petrov passed the uncorraborated warnings up the chain. Maybe the higher-ups would have waited for further confirmation. Maybe their procedures *required *they wait for further confirmation while making preparations to launch. Maybe they’d have gotten cold feet & done nothing. Or they might have gone hard-over and launched immediately.
As a general matter, what is the moral value of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Which *may *in fact have been what he did. A complex question to be sure.
Ultimately it’s criminally stupid that humananity has wandered into this situation. I hope we can, over the next 50 or 100 years, develop the wisdom to climb back out. The more I see public life worldwide dominated by Dark Ages religion, xenophobia, and greed, the less optimistic I become.
Piggybacking on LSLguy’s post, if you issued launch orders to crews without telling them it was an exercise then the missiles would… launch. Well, two thirds, at any rate.
This got me thinking, did the men in the silos know where their missiles were pointing? Did they know exactly what they would blow up if they launched or did they just know that the targets were somewhere in Russia?
A couple thoughts …(overall I agree with a lot of the thrust of what you said)
- The process which selects leaders for corporate America and for politics is utterly faulty and selects mostly for skill in self-dealing. The process in the military is a lot better. Still far from the Platonic Ideal of leadership, but much better. If you’ve never experienced that difference personally, it’s not surprising that you’re taking a cynical initial position. I know I would.
- By and large, the point of any hierarchy is NOT that people farther up the food chain are *smarter *than you are. It’s that they have *more *information about the *bigger *picture than you do. You have more information about the local smaller picture. So they make the large decisions in broad strokes based on that large context, and you make the small decisions with fine strokes in your local context. Either role is incompetent at making decisions in the opposite context.
Where more monolithic cultures (military or otherwise) fail is in assuming that high-level decision makers can in fact make low-level decisions well. Avoiding that pitfall was indeed one of the DoD’s strengths in my era. As best I can tell from a distance it’s still holding up fairly well today despite the advances in communications which now permit much greater armchair quarterbacking from DC.
3. For the specific case of nuke warfare, all this is scripted out and planned in tremendous detail. Calm people in quiet rooms spend lots of time developing decision trees, targeting plans, lists of aggravating & mitigating decision factors, etc. To a much larger degree than deciding on, say a new product launch or marketing plan, the decisions are pre-made; they just need to be executed. This is precisely so the folks who’re caught off guard when whatever triggering event happens to happen don’t have to *ad lib *the response under great stress.
To be sure, nobody at the Pentagon or White House is going to just mechanically follow the flowchart to step 14.b.3.d.8 which says “Push the button; destroy the world.” without some soul searching. Dick Cheney jokes notwithstanding.
And it’s exactly my faith in that process which permitted me to take that single-minded attitude with a clear-enough conscience set in a rigorous & thought-through set of morals and ethics.
Yes exactly. I was debunking the OP’s scenario as so unlikely as to be impossible. I believe the OP’s event is/was nothing but urban legend or something from Hollywood.
“How about a nice game of chess?”
I didn’t destroy the world yesterday. Do I have to again today?
Egad! I hope you don’t destroy the world. That’s where I keep all my stuff!
I can see making some kind of riddle out of this:
My job is to not do my job, except when ordered.
If I do my job when ordered, I will probably do it one time and then never again.
If I do my job without orders, I will possibly do it one time and certainly never again.
If I refuse to do my job when ordered, I will never get another chance to do my job.
Who am I?
Answer: a strategic nuclear missile launch technician.
Thanks for the reply, always interesting to read the perspective of someone at (or who has been at) the sharp end of things.
I remember in one of his short stories, Joe Haldeman wrote about a missile officer waiting day after day for “cataclysmic nuclear war or adverse executive decision.” 
I vaguely remember some science fiction short story from the late 60’s about this scenario - two men alone in a missile silo, and the order comes in to fire. No sure, I think one refuses, the other kills him, but the two fire keys are more than 6 feet apart and must be turned simultaneously, so the zealous guy has still failed…
The argument for bombing civilians is that in an industrial society war, almost everyone’s a participant and a target - the person who drives the tank, the one who makes ball bearings so the tank can roll, the one who packs the lunch for the ball bearing maker or paves the road so the bll bearings can be delivered t the tank factory, or runs the generating station that provides power for it all, or farms the food for the soldiers and workers. Seriously where does it stop? There’s a reason that all-out war makes no sense.
The launch technicians know there are a number of safeguards in place so that the orders won’t come in unless the situation is real. I doubt this test ever took place because it would undermine the confidence these technicians have in the safeguard system. I would suspect some number would ignore the order in the end, but most will follow orders and have no problem destroying the earth. If they’re not in a submarine, they probably expect to get hit themselves at any moment.