If you will not honor literally saving the world, what will you honor?
I find it extremely troubling that we’re honoring someone defecting against their side in a matter as serious as global nuclear war, merely because in this case, the outcome happened to be good.
(but deterrence would have helped no one if he had launched)
That is exactly the crux of my disagreement. We act as if there were a direct lever between Petrov and the keys and buttons that launch a retaliatory counterstrike. But there wasn’t. There were other people in the chain of command. There were other sensors. Do we really find it that difficult to believe that the Soviets would not have attempted to verify Petrov’s claim before retaliating? That there would not have been practiced procedures to carry out this verification? From what I’ve read of the Soviet Union, their systems of positive control were far ahead of the United States’ as a result of the much lower level of trust the Soviet Politburo had in their military. I find it exceedingly unlikely that the Soviets would have launched without conducting at least some kind of verification with a secondary system. They knew the consequences of nuclear attack just as well as we did.
In that context, Petrov’s actions are far less justifiable. He threw away all of the procedures and training that he had… for a hunch. While everything did turn out okay in this instance, it’s certainly not a mode of behavior I’d want to see established as a precedent. As I said above: Petrov’s actions were just as unilateralist as the people releasing the GPT-2 models, and I find it discomfiting that a holiday opposing that sort of unilateral action is named after someone who, arguably, was maximally unilateralist in his thinking.
I find it extremely troubling that we’re honoring someone defecting against their side in a matter as serious as global nuclear war, merely because in this case, the outcome happened to be good.
That is exactly the crux of my disagreement. We act as if there were a direct lever between Petrov and the keys and buttons that launch a retaliatory counterstrike. But there wasn’t. There were other people in the chain of command. There were other sensors. Do we really find it that difficult to believe that the Soviets would not have attempted to verify Petrov’s claim before retaliating? That there would not have been practiced procedures to carry out this verification? From what I’ve read of the Soviet Union, their systems of positive control were far ahead of the United States’ as a result of the much lower level of trust the Soviet Politburo had in their military. I find it exceedingly unlikely that the Soviets would have launched without conducting at least some kind of verification with a secondary system. They knew the consequences of nuclear attack just as well as we did.
In that context, Petrov’s actions are far less justifiable. He threw away all of the procedures and training that he had… for a hunch. While everything did turn out okay in this instance, it’s certainly not a mode of behavior I’d want to see established as a precedent. As I said above: Petrov’s actions were just as unilateralist as the people releasing the GPT-2 models, and I find it discomfiting that a holiday opposing that sort of unilateral action is named after someone who, arguably, was maximally unilateralist in his thinking.