Discussion
"First, it was just one missile, but then another, and another, until the system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched."
Happy Stanislav Petrov Day, fediverse!
(From 2018) https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union
@stefan It's shocking (and heartening) how many times humanity owes its survival to one largely anonymous drone in a silo muttering "hard pass" to himself...
@LevZadov Thank you! I don't know how I missed that.
@stefan History actually records at least TWO cases of Soviet officers saving the world from nuclear war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vice Admiral Vasily Arkhipov, COD aboard a flotilla submarine in the area, refused to give his necessary third-man consent to the launch of a nuclear torpedo in responce to practice depth charges dropped by US ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov#Role_in_the_Cuban_Missile_Crisis
@stefan Good argument to keep a human-in-the-loop.
@stefan.... be like Stanislav Petrov
As Eliezer Yudkowsky said in a blog post commenting on the day:
Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.
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The Soviet early warning system that day was only 3 weeks old - they hadn't even finished testing it before Petrov's shift.