September 26 is the anniversary of the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident—item #24 on Wikipedia’s upsettingly long “List of Nuclear Close Calls”—in which Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov did an excellent job at not starting World War III.
Quarterly Performance Review, Autumn 1983
Colonel Yuri Kuznetsov looked out the window anxiously. The endless gray landscape did little to soothe his nerves. He only had one employee review left to get through, but he’d saved the hardest one for last.
He wasn’t upset about having to dismiss Lieutenant Colonel Petrov—he couldn’t wait to be rid of the little shit—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. He took a swig from his flask.
“Stanislav, you can come in now,” Yuri shouted as he opened the door and nearly smashed Stanislav Petrov in the face. “Have a seat,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Thank you sir. Overjoyed to be here as always,” Stanislav said.
“The purpose of this meeting is for us to discuss various concerns that have emerged about your performance over the past several months,” said Yuri. “Looking through your chart, what I’m seeing here is that this quarter you’ve managed to achieve… nothing.”
“That’s right sir,” Stanislav piped.
“This is consistent with your performance in the previous quarter, per my notes from our last meeting, in which you also accomplished nothing,” Yuri continued.
“Yes, sir! And I’ve run the numbers several times and I feel pretty confident that this coming quarter I’ll be able to increase my output by 50%, bringing it up to also nothing,” Stanislav said.
Yuri sighed. “Stanislav, let’s talk about the purpose of this job. Your record thus far is abysmal. I hired you to monitor our early warning system for intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s the easiest job: you stare at the screen, and if it says MISSILES INCOMING you call me. Have you even been watching it?”
“Very closely, sir!” said Stanislav. “And it’s quite fascinating work, too, watching a blinking screen day-in and day-out, really makes me feel great about my computer science degree. I mean nearly every day it’s completely blank.”
“Not every day, though, Stanislav, is that right?” Yuri said.
“Ah, right, well, that’s actually something I wanted to talk about in this review sir,” Stanislav said, looking a little less smug than usual. “And I first of all just wanted to quickly apologize for not bringing that up sooner, I actually wrote out a long email to let you know about it that I thought I’d sent but one of those new gmail filters caught it and it never left the outbox, you know how they keep adding all those safety precautions to weed out spam and phishing-”
“Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, is it true that you were the commander on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker shortly after midnight on September 26?” Yuri said.
“Well yes-”
“And is it the case that it was your responsibility to observe the early-warning satellites, code-named Oko, and to notify me of any impending nuclear missile attacks against the Soviet Union?”
“I-”
“Did you observe anything out of the ordinary that night?”
Petrov squirmed. “Okay, so yeah, there may have been one intercontinental ballistic missile detected—well, five, if you also count the four missiles behind it—but it seemed more likely to be some kind of computer malfunction because honestly it would be ridiculous for the United States to launch nuclear weapons against us and assure mutual destruction. Plus the base rate for bugs in our radar systems is like two a day, three if Dmitry starts coding before he’s had his morning cup of vodka.”
“Did you then ascertain whether the missiles detected were in fact system malfunctions?” Yuri responded.
“Here’s the tricky thing—say we’re in the situation where the air radar is malfunctioning. Our land radar can’t detect missiles beyond the horizon, so there aren’t any computer systems that know where the missile is—I guess the missile knows where it is, but other than that—so I didn’t have an easy way to cross-check my work here,” Stanislav said.
“Your work?”
“Ah- well really more like a vibes-based read of the situation,” Stanislav said.
“Did you think to escalate to me or any of your other superiors?” Yuri barked.
“Let’s take an outside view for a moment,” Stanislav said, now staring out the window. “99.9% of the time, the reason there’s a flashing missile on our screen isn’t going to be because the United States decided to go trigger happy with the nukes. That was a one-time thing that happened twice. But 99.9% of the time, it’s going to be because of a software malfunction. Escalating would have prompted an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack against what was likely to be an internal off-by-one error.”
“Under what circumstances,” Yuri said slowly, “would you have seen cause to escalate to your superiors?”
Stanislav paused. “Well,” he started. “In the case of an actual strike, I guess we’d expect to see a massive influx of missiles on screen, and corroborative evidence from ground control, plus at least two code reviews on whatever software patch had been most recently pushed to prod, and depending how quickly I can check the commit history, maybe a mushroom cloud taking form on the horizon.”
Yuri waited.
“But if all that had happened, as soon as I’d seen one whiff of a flammagenitus cloud, even only vaguely fungal in shape, I’d have dialed your number immediately, sir,” Stanislav said.
“Surely you can understand things from my perspective, Stanislav. The department is undergoing serious budget cuts. I’m being told I need to lay off 20% of the population of the Soviet Union. We’re trying to save money wherever we can—we’ve already cut out excess spending on luxury goods like oil and grain—and it’s hard to justify keeping a position that pays software-engineer level salaries but only requires you to occasionally toggle a computer mouse to indicate you haven’t fallen asleep.
“It seems, Stanislav, that you’ve got a great heuristic here: 99.9% of the time, we’re safe from nuclear missiles. Am I right to conclude that you could profitably be replaced by a rock saying ‘NO NUCLEAR WAR HERE, GO BACK TO SLEEP’?” Yuri said. He could feel his blood pressure rising.
“Sir, you can’t deny that my achievement of nothing this past quarter was a substantial outperformance over the alternative,” Stanislav protested. “I mean it would have been pretty embarrassing to start World War III over a software malfunction. And can you imagine what the press would think if they knew this had almost happened?”
“That’s enough, Stanislav!” Yuri boomed. “You’re getting a formal writeup, reassignment to a less sensitive post, and post traumatic stress disorder.”
“I mean it’s weird nobody’s mentioned anything to them yet given how trigger-happy this department is,” Petrov went on, a grin forming on his face. “But I imagine any day now somebody could…”
Yuri felt desperation sinking in. “Stanislav, listen to me. You keep your mouth shut, take a different post, and in exchange I’ll write you a new clear record. Deal?”
“A nuclear wreck ordeal? Sir, to think that’s what I’ve been trying to avoid!” Petrov said.
“Out!”
Quarterly Performance Review, Winter 1983
“As I mentioned in my email,” Yuri began, “the purpose of this meeting is for us to discuss your main accomplishments since taking up this position, your career goals going forward, and any major growth areas you’d like to focus on.”
The rock said nothing.
“Right,” Yuri said. “Well. I suppose it’s worth noting that so far, you haven’t had a single false positive. So that’s a good sign.”
The rock continued to remain silent. Engraved on his front were the words NO NUCLEAR WAR HERE, GO BACK TO SLEEP. On the back, someone had graffitied PETROV, which conveniently meant “rock” and thus didn’t require Yuri to file any additional paperwork for a new replacement rock.
“This job might seem easy,” Yuri said, “but be careful not to take it for granite.”
The rock did not dignify Yuri’s joke with a response.
“The last guy who had this position was way boulder,” Yuri said, and chuckled.
“You complete and utter moron. You total imbecile,” the rock said. “Nuclear deterrence doesn’t work without a credible retaliatory threat. If you can’t signal that you’d escalate dramatically in the case of a missile strike, you’re incentivizing your opponents to attack first.” The rock got up and started heading for the door.
Yuri blinked. “A talking rock,” he stammered.
“Oh, did you think I was going to just sit here and wait for a nuclear winter? I guess I’m just not… sedimentary enough for you,” the rock said.
Yuri looked out the window stupidly. In the distance, a mushroom cloud began to take form.
sorry did you mean ignify
Mild spoilers for a contemporary science-fiction book, but the second half was a major plot point in
The Dark Forest, the sequel to Three-Body Problem
Well, actually the missile knows where it isn’t.