It seems like one of the ways people have been trying to reply to this thread is via the “Great Man” theory of history, i.e., the actions of one person (man or woman) can change the course of history, such as the references to Alexander the Great, Jesus and Churchill; and these folk are in fact are the definers of the great patterns discernable throughout history. I don’t have specific references (I’m at work and have to get to a meeting) but I have no doubt that there are several old postings and lots of web sites devoted to debating whether the Great Man theory should hold sway.
In terms of saving the world in an action hero sort of way, the way Jackas originally posted and tried to course correct back to later - the real question is: what is the scale we are discussing? If we are literally discussing “the world”, then only situations where complete obliteration of the planet qualify - the Russian who chose not to go nuclear to a feared US attack might quality, but even then, would that nuclear war have obliterated the whole world? I don’t know the particulars of the tonnage of warheads involved. Or maybe a classified scientist stopping a biological warfare event gone awry…
If, on the other hand, we are talking about saving a country, region, city, etc. from destruction (physical, governmental, etc.) there may be lots of stories.
Since I seem to be about the only one paying any attention to the OP, I’ll continue on a similar theme.
I nominate a fellow in Japan, Tsutsumi Sakamoto. Sakamoto was a lawyer who first blew the whistle on Aum Shinrikyo. At that time, Aum had substantial biological weaponry in development, and they had already made substantial progress towards creating biological weapons that could have released a huge plague on the world. And Aum absolutely WOULD have done it, it was their insane religious belief that they would be the only ones to survive a world holocaust, and they had every intention of starting one.
Alas, Aum abducted Sakamoto and his entire family and killed them. It was primarily the uproar over his disappearance that brought down the law on Aum. Sakamoto sacrificed his life to oppose Aum, and in the process, brought down Aum. The police raided Aum’s biological weapons factory while investigating the Sakamoto abduction, but Aum was tipped off and they destroyed most of their stocks of Sarin and hid the manufacturing apparatus. If not for that raid, they might have committed a more successful poison gas attack on Tokyo. Even if Sakamoto didn’t save the world, he saved Tokyo.
Here’s a short article on Aum with a mention of Sakamoto: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol4No1/aum_shinrikyo.htm
There have been a few nuclear false alarms where the decisions of a small group of people have averted disaster. Although they come close to the “Great Man” criteria, I don’t think they fit. I provide them only for clarification to the earlier posts:
Nov 9, 1979 - American missile crews in the Midwest receive data from the Defense Support Program satellites which indicate that a massive first-strike is under way by the Soviet Union. In actuality, training data had been fed into the computers by mistake. This was a close call, but the chance of a premature retaliatory strike by the US was near 0%. Standard procedures include checking with the early-warning satellites for live data to verify that the DPS satellites are accurate. US leaders decided to hold the missile for another day. I can only assume Jimmy Carter was among them. gasp
Jan 25, 1995 - Russian radar detects a missile launch off the coast of Norway. The telemetry looks suspicisouly like a US Trident missile meant to blind Russian radar to incoming ground-based Minuteman and MX missiles. The precise details of the event are not clear, but it is likely that alarms went off all over the Eastern Hemisphere. It appears that Boris Yeltsin was instrumental in the decision against launching a counter attack.
The man Chas E. mentions was one Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov who you can read about here: http://www.armscontrol.ru/start/publications/petrov.htm
Sep 26, 1983 Col. Petrov was in charge of validating any warnings of a surprise nuclear attack from data originating in ground-based radars and the satellite-based early-detection system. At the time, the US was about to install PershingII missiles throughout Europe, and the Soviet Union assumed that the Able Archer joint military exercise was a cover for a massive invasion. Scattered high-clouds over a Montana military base reflected sunlight into the infrared detectors aboard the Soviet satellites which look amazingly like rocket plumes, triggering an alarm. As different clouds reflected light, more alarms would sound indicating more launches. Petrov went back and forth with the Soviet General Staff, and it appears that they pressured him to make a decision. Petrov decided that if the US was going to attack the soviet Union, they would do it with a massive first-strike and not a handful of missiles from Montana. He wisely decided it was a false alarm. Afterwards he was scapegoated for the incident, but the real culprit was bad hardware rushed into production and limited experience with the technology.
Hey, who hasn’t saved Tokyo from time to time? It’s a city perpetually in trouble, what with Mothra and the cults and all. Why just last week …
Anyway, so far, I think Petrov best fits the criteria put forth in the original post. One man, one decision.
Maybe this will help spur some further thoughts… What can human beings possibly do today that would end the world? Nuclear annhiliation and widespread plaque are the only two that come to mind.
Thanks evilhanz, Petrov sounds like a good candidate to me, but that wasn’t the incident I was thinking of. This incident was a real missile launch in the north atlantic. The US had notified the Sovs that this test was going to take place, but the warning was not known to the commanders, the warning got mislaid somewhere. They assumed it was a sub launched missile until enough data came in to indicate it was headed out to sea. That info came very late, less than 2 minutes until the Sovs had to commit to a retaliatory strike.
I’ll see if I can dig up more info, I saw this on some TV documentary about nuclear false alarms, surely there’s more info on the web somewhere. Maybe FAS has something.
Chas E.: I’m certain that you’re thinking of the 1995 incident. The details fit all of the criteria: 1) rocket launch from the northern seas 2) a mislaid warning 3) less than 2 minutes before retaliation 4) rocket was assumed to be a sub-based launch.
Do you actually think we (humans) have the power to destroy this planet? True we could kill lots of stuff but there is no way we have the power to kill off the earth. Nor do I see any single person that had the power to save humanity from total exitnction.
The only excpetion is when humans first started out - maybe there was one who actually saved humanity but we don’t know.
Now if you want to say who saved the world from thermonuclear warfare I would argue (and many people are not going to like this answer but ) Ronald Reagan forced the Soviet Union into bankrupcy elimating a superpower threat.
And we all know that the Lord Jesus saved the world.
Well, me and some friends of mine put one of our big black rectangles down and helped out some of your ancestors. In retrospect we kind of regret it except for making Cheryl Ladd.
I remember seeing on tv another cold war nuke close-call that i don’t think was mentioned yet. I can’t give specific details but it had something to do with someone on a US airbase spotting someone trying to get over the fence. I’m not sure why, but a bunch of planes were scrambled and ready to take off (did they have a spy or saboteur?). The guard/s soon realized that it was a black bear messing around at the fence, but couldn’t get the message to the planes or tower quick enough. Another guy jumped into a jeep and tore across the runway in front of the planes to stop them just before they taxied out. My details are obviously sketchy and incomplete… may not have been as serious as a nuke situation… but the whole story was on a coldwar documentary I saw about a year ago. Unfortunately, stroies of individuals saving the world (in the present anyways) in real-life wouldn’t make for very good movies… much cooler to have a super stud taking out the entire bad-guy army with a couple grenades and deactivating the nuclear weapon with his teeth while hanging by one foot from a super-sonic jet at 30,000 feet
… than the realistic scenario of a couple people sitting in a dark control room monitoring a radar screen and picking up a phone to tell the comander the missle threat was a false alarm.
Actually, I was once told (by a teacher, no less) that we now have nuclear bombs powerful enough to, quite literally, crack the earth in half. Can anyone verify/debunk this?
I have heard quite the opposite that all the nukes detonated at once does not have the power of a major earthquake or voccano.
I don’t know if it is quite true but I think it very more likely then being able to ‘crack the earth in half’.
Actually that is laughable - what else did that teacher tell you? There is no way we could crack a solid/liquid/solid ball through surface detonations.
I’ve heard this before - from a teacher. In 10th grade, our “science” teacher told us sneeringly that “Thanks to Reagan” ( :rolleyes: ) we can now “completely vaporize the Earth”. When a fellow member of the gifted program challanged him on it, he was actually told to “shut up; I’m teaching this class, not you.”
I’m speculating that this “fact” about the Earth must have appeared in some disarmament funding literature.
Needless to say - your teacher is wrong. Demand a cite, or tell them to kindly stop repeating it. Also, give them http://www.snopes.com to look through - they probably are also waiting eagerly for Bill Gates to send the free DisneyWorld tickets…
Perhaps you heard wrong. Maybe he didn’t say “nuclear bombs” but “Castle Grey Skull sites”. They sound kind of similar: http://www.angelfire.com/sk/HELLKNIGHTT/
I’ve heard that phoney baloney about “enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth n times over”. It isn’t true as stated.
Originally, that overkill statistic was used like this: “The total energy yield of all nuclear weapons on earth is enough to destroy every person on Earth n times over based on the casualty rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. It has become corrupted over time by people who don’t know any better. It’s a meaningless number. If you could get every person on Earth to stand in a tight circle, with the guy in the middle responsible for pushing the big, red button we could probably wipe out our species. In practice, the results would be much different. Although major population centers would certainly be destroyed, a great majority of people around the world would survive. I don’t need to go into all the details of how a nuclear war would progress or what the effects would be - you can look that up for yourself, but it’s certain that on a geologic scale, the Earth would be just fine.
Here’s a verifiable comparison that should debunk this common myth. The meteorite that allegedly destroyed the dinosaurs 65 mil yrs ago was ~6 miles in diameter and created a crater ~60-100 miles wide. The detonation of all nuclear weapons at the height of the cold war could only produce about one one-thousandth as much energy.
Actually, we can probably do more damage than the Dino-Killer since our bombs are more spread out.
Early in the “Super” development (H-Bomb), Teller realized that there was a limit to the size of the H-Bomb. It was not that you could not build a bomb with bigger yield, it is just that at some point most of your energy is used just to put stuff further out into space, not make a bigger hole.
I think a metor strike is the same way. Since all that energy is concentrated in such a small area, most is “wasted”. Since our 300 kT warheads would be spread over a wide area, the devastation would be much worse.
My source is Rhodes’ “Dark Sun”, the excellent companion to “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.”
I’m pretty sure that this is wrong. Just watch any of the films of the H-Bomb tests.
While it is true that the populations in Africa and South America would be not directly affected by the blasts how do you think Africa would fair with no help from the west in their fight against AIDS. How do you think the climate change will affect the rest of the world. Global Nuke War would end human life on this planet. Maybe not directly from the blast but we would all be dead in ten years or less.
It’s a city perpetually in trouble, what with Mothra and the cults and all. Why just last week …
) Ronald Reagan forced the Soviet Union into bankrupcy elimating a superpower threat.