Times The World Almost Burned

Buttons and fires and bears oh my!

We will all go together when we go.
All suffuse with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd's of london will be loaded when they go.

—Tom Lehrer “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”

Reading about the history of nuclear near misses engenders several feelings: existential terror, hatred of bears, and love of one particular safety switch. Oh, and surprise that we still have two Carolinas.

Reading about how close we have repeatedly been to nuclear annihilation, to a nuclear power using nukes against another nuclear power, without any clear plant for de-escalation, makes it obvious that we need a new plan for nuclear weapons. We need to do something very differently from what we’re currently doing, because we are currently gambling with the fate of the world. And we have gambled over and over again.

In 1961, a plane lost power because of a fuel leak over North Carolina, releasing its two warheads, each of which was 260 times more powerful than the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima. Nuclear weapons have switches designed to prevent nuclear weapons from failing. Three of those switches failed. Residents of North Carolina should be very, very grateful to that switch. Trump often says that absent things he did, we wouldn’t have a country anymore: absent that little switch that could, there might only be one Carolina.

Just two months later, something similar happened in California—nuclear weapons fell from a plane, but the safety switches worked as intended.

We’ve been one lone, solitary switch away from disaster. Nuclear weapons have repeatedly fallen from the sky over American cities, only to be rescued, just in the nick of time, by a single safety switch.

Yet this isn’t even the scariest near miss.

It took billions of years for any life to exist, billions more for it to become human, hundreds of thousands of years for any civilization to develop, thousands for it to develop the kind of flourishing civilization that we see in the west and it was almost ended by a single defective switch.

Of course, it’s not exactly clear what would have happened had the weapon detonated. Would the United States have retaliated, thinking it was a hostile strike? Would we have known it was our own incompetence that decimated a significant chunk of North Carolina? We have no idea what would happen if a nuclear weapon is used in a world with nuclear superpowers, where there is escalation up the nuclear ladder.

This is far from the most terrifying near-miss, though.

That honor goes to the Akhipov incident, occurring at the height of the cuban missile crisis. JFK ordered a flotilla of ships off the coast of Cuba to prevent the Soviets from carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba, and to get them to remove the missiles already there. The U.S. began dropping depth charges—anti submarine missiles. They’d told Moscow that the point of the missiles was to get the submarines to surface, not to destroy them.

But Moscow wasn’t in communications with the commanders. They were in the dark, being attacked by U.S. missiles, under the water, getting radio silence from Moscow. They assume a war had started.

And they had a nuclear missile.

There were three senior officers who had to agree before a nuclear launch could take place. Two of them did agree. Only Vasili Arkhipov dissented and, in doing so, preventing the Soviets from firing a nuclear missile at the United States during the height of the cuban Missile crisis. The captain supported the strike, chillingly saying “We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not become the shame of the fleet.” Arkhipov narrowly avoided Xenocide—at least, on most accounts, though there are some dissenters.

Arkhipov isn’t the only Soviet who sounds like he could be one of those Russian chess grandmasters that Bobby Fisher beat who might have saved the world: another is Stanislav Petrov. Petrov was on duty when a censor malfunctioned and detected a nuclear launch. Petrov made the heroic decision not to send the news of a nuclear launch up the chain of command, very likely averting a nuclear war. Petrov has described his belief that had anyone else been on duty, they would have followed orders and passed the supposed launch up the chain of command. The decision took place at a time of heightened tensions: had Petrov not disobeyed orders, good odds that a nuclear war would have started.

During the Cuban missile crisis, JFK estimated that there was about a one in three chance that a nuclear war would start. At the height of the crisis, an alarm tripped by a bear almost started a nuclear launch (worst bear in history, am I right?) A nuclear war was only averted because right before the nuclear planes took off, an officer quickly drove to them and stopped them—had he been five minutes late, a nuclear war could very well have started.

One can read about dozens of nuclear near misses. We have courted oblivion over and over again, risking the annihilation of life on Earth because of dangerous military maneuvers and nuclear proliferation. For that reason, it’s alarming that both presidential candidates have scaled up the building of nuclear weapons, each building new ones. Twice as many nuclear weapons means that the probability of a nuclear accident is roughly twice as high. Trump gutted arms control agreements, and Biden has done little to restore them.

Our politicians fail us by ignoring the risk of a scarlet apocalypse. Voters should take nuclear policy into account in their voting decisions. We should stop supporting the insane policies that lead to more nuclear weapons being built, with fewer safety procedures. While many near misses have come from having too many nuclear weapons, none have come from having too few: no near misses involved, for example, a nation almost carrying out a devastating first strike. Yet despite this, nuclear weapons keep getting built, under the two most recent administrations, because of delusions of first strikes and fears of inadequate modernization.

Paranoid delusions, used to motivate foreign policy have caused disaster after disaster—the invasion of Iraq, the slaughter of half a million people in Yemen, and the razing of entire countries. Currently, those same fears are being used to bring the world closer to the edge, to raise the probability of a nuclear holocaust. We need a saner nuclear policy, involving deescalation, arms control treaties, and reduced arsenal sizes. Until we have that, each passing year will bring the world closer and closer to destruction.

I’d appreciate if you could share this article—I think this is an important subject that more people should be informed about. Would appreciate any restacks!