Easter Egg

Congrats on finding the Easter Egg for Plays Well With Others!

Remember the story that opened Chapter 19? The one about the leper colony on Molokai? That wasn’t the story I had initially planned on using…

Below you’ll find the original one I was going to tell. In the end I didn’t feel it fit quite as well for the book. It pained me not to use it because the event it described is just so incredible. I’m glad to be able to share this story with you here instead of it just sitting on my hard drive collecting digital dust.

Please enjoy!

Alternate Chapter 19 Story

Stanislov Petrov saved the world… Literally. You would most certainly be dead now were it not for him. And if your birthday is after Sept. 26, 1983, well, you probably wouldn’t have been born at all.

Petrov was a duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the Soviet military command center that monitored satellite data for incoming nuclear attack. And on that day in 1983, alarms began blaring. Lights flashed on the dashboard in front of him. The satellite early warning system detected an intercontinental ballistic missile launch. The United States had initiated a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. Protocol was clear: Petrov was to notify his superiors so they could retaliate. But he froze.

On the electronic map in front of him he could see the missile on its way. Petrov would later remark, “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.” It’s a bit of an understatement to say time was something of an issue here. In roughly 25 minutes the missile would reach its target. If he kept delaying, the Soviets would be unable to strike back. But he also knew that his superiors would not hesitate like he did. Once he made the call, full nuclear war was all but certain. It would likely be the end of the world. But then a second US missile launched.

Another blip on the map heading for Moscow. He double checked the computer. The alert reliability had the designation of “highest.” But he could not move. “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.”

A third missile launched. A fourth. A fifth. But he did not lift the phone. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he would tell The Washington Post. He didn’t trust the early warning system computer. He never had. Petrov checked with the radar operators. They said they hadn’t detected any missiles… But the missiles might not have yet reached the horizon where radar could pick them up. If he waited for clarity, it would be too late. Protocol was clear. Petrov was supposed to rely on the computer in front of him and report this as an attack. Still, he could not bring himself to lift the phone. Five missiles on the way…

But only five. No more had launched. That didn’t sit right with his intuition. He’d been told a first strike would be an all-out attack to overwhelm Soviet defenses. Why would the Americans only fire five? It didn’t make sense. And still nothing on the radar. Should he call?

The correct answer was far from clear. If the US was going to attack, now would actually make perfect sense. Just three weeks prior, Korean Air Lines flight 007 had accidentally breached Soviet airspace and the Kremlin shot it down, killing 269 passengers including Larry McDonald, a US Congressman. President Ronald Reagan had recently declared Russia the “evil empire.” NATO had been ramping up military exercises. This was one of the hottest moments of the Cold War.

Petrov felt the odds were 50-50. It would have to be a gut decision. Lost in thought, his mind was going a million miles an hour.

But then he felt the eyes on him. 100 colleagues staring at him as the sirens continued to blare. He snapped back to reality as if waking from a dream. Five minutes had gone by. He had to decide.

Petrov lifted the phone. He called the Kremlin. And he told them…

System malfunction. False alarm.

He had disobeyed orders. He had been told to obey the computer but as Petrov would later say, “We are wiser than the computers. We created them.” The rational thing to do in his position would have been to call it in as an attack. But humans don’t always do the immediately rational thing. That’s not how we survived. We try to do the wise thing. Even when we’re not sure.

If he was wrong, the missiles would hit shortly. And so what followed were the longest minutes anyone has ever waited for anything on planet Earth… “Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.”

What had happened? Sunlight had reflected of clouds over North Dakota and the Soviet satellites had mistaken it for American ICBMs. And so with no exaggeration whatsoever I can say, “Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov saved the world.” It had been a 50-50 shot. There was no way to know. The computers were useless. In fact, they were worse than useless; they were wrong. But when things are at their worst, humans are often at their best.

If you have ever wondered if one person can make a diference, well, that answer is definitively “yes.” One person can save a community — can save all of humanity, in fact.

We often forget how precious and precarious our existence on this planet is. We take so much for granted. But we can’t take each other for granted. We have not survived this long as disparate individuals, but as a community. And our strength as a species comes from our ability to cooperate, from never forgetting we’re in this together.

Thank You!

This officially concludes the Easter Egg portion of tonight’s entertainment.

Thanks again for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon here. Thanks!

Sincerely,
Eric