Happy Petrov Day

This is the reading I gave at my Astral Codex Ten meetup tonight. It was adapted from this blog post and some of the rituals at petrovday.com. I didn’t want to do a whole hour-long ritual, but I wanted to take a few minutes to commemorate the holiday. This seemed to work well.

Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Petrov on September 26th, 1983. 

The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails.  269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald.  Ronald Reagan called it "barbarism," "inhuman brutality," and "a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten".  Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations.  Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was planning a first strike.  The KGB sent a flash message to its operatives warning them to prepare for possible nuclear war.

On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the officer on duty in the Soviet Air Defense Force near Moscow when the warning system reported a US missile launch.  Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error.

Then the system reported another US missile launch.

And another, and another, and another. According to the system, a total of five nuclear missiles had been launched, and were heading for the Soviet Union.

In Petrov’s own words:

“An alarm at the command and control post went off with red lights blinking on the terminal. It was a nasty shock. Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me. What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems - on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct; the probability factor is two. ... The highest.”

What had actually happened, investigators later determined, was sunlight on high-altitude clouds aligning with the satellite view on a US missile base.

The policy of the Soviet Union called for launch on warning. Their land radar could not detect missiles over the horizon, and waiting for positive identification would limit the response time to minutes. If the launch was real, failing to report it promptly could mean losing a nuclear war. What would you have done? Petrov again:

“I imagined if I’d assume the responsibility for unleashing the third World War - and I said, no, I wouldn’t. ... I always thought of it. Whenever I came on duty, I always refreshed it in my memory.”

Instead of telling his superiors what the system was saying, Petrov told his superiors that it was a false alarm - despite not really knowing this was the case.

Did this actually prevent a nuclear war? The Russian government says no, of course. But other experts say yes. Ultimately, I don't know, but it did lower the chances of one, and that's good enough for me. 

Petrov was first congratulated, then extensively interrogated, then reprimanded for failing to follow procedure. He resigned in poor health from the military several months later. Decades later, once his account was publicized, he received a number of awards and honors, but nothing approaching the magnitude of his heroism. On September 7th of 2017, a friend of Stanislav Petrov called him on the phone to wish him a happy birthday, only to learn that Petrov had died several months prior, in May of that year.

One of the goals of the rationalist community is to resist creating bad outcomes, even when our incentives are aligned in favor of them. We tend to call these situations coordination problems or prisoners dilemmas. Zvi calls them moral mazes. Scott Alexander calls them Moloch. Today, we choose to honor Petrov for his decision not to destroy the world, despite his incentives saying that he should. Petrov resisted Moloch, and as is typically the case with such actions, received little reward for it in life. But we, here today, honor him and seek to use his example to remind ourselves not to destroy the world, even if it seems like we should.