thethemeis: Risk
theauthoris: Gary Sykes-Blythe
1983.
Captain Petrov tapped a plastic pen against his teeth pensively.
Hmmmmm...’see the positives of the Argentine rain’.
He sat with his up feet on his wobbly desk with Pravda open on his lap; it wasn’t today’s edition, but he was only doing the crossword. Some thoughtless person had already done half of it, but most of it was wrong and that was frustrating. He slapped the paper down and sighed at the darkened concrete ceiling of the Oko Nuclear Early Warning Detection Command (West) Bunker. He picked up his cup and sipped in a bored kind of way.
‘Denisov! What the fuck is wrong with this coffee?’ A head poked around the doorway. Denisov was the man on mess duty today and apparently he wasn’t doing very well.
‘Comrade Captain?’
‘The coffee! What is wrong with it?’
‘That’s tea, sir.’ Petrov slammed the cup on top of the desk in a way that would’ve smashed it, had it been made of anything as genteel as porcelain.
‘I know! I was being ironic, you provincial moron. I don’t like fucking tea.’ Petrov slopped the tea over his shoulder where it made a long splash on the dim wall. ‘Bring me some coffee.’
‘There isn’t any, sir.’
‘Oh. Bring me some more tea then.’
‘Sir!’ And with that Denisov bustled away, apparently relieved to be elsewhere. It was one of Captain Petrov’s favourite pastimes to bully him. He picked up the paper again.
Suddenly, the lights in the room switched to an angry red. Petrov looked around him, slightly annoyed. A moment later red text appeared on the banks of screen at the front of the room. Angry red letters flashed against the black. Tinny horns and sirens wailed atonally.
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
Warning?
Petrov rapidly gathered his feet under him and stood up. He straightened his uniform without thinking and strode to the wall of screens. The sirens screamed their alerts; he could hear the whistling in his ears already. It’ll be there for a fucking week.
He searched his mind hastily for a memory of a scheduled test.
He briefly wondered if it were a Stavka inspection or drill.
He scanned the screens again. Surely not... surely not...
But still:
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
Petrov strode to the station behind the lead technician. ‘Report,’ he snapped over the sound of the alarms. The junior technician was flustered and stammered.
‘Uh, well, I don’t know, sir. Everything just went... red.’ He trailed off vaguely.
‘Cause?’
‘I, er, don’t know sir. The system has detected, um, a... series of launches from North America.’
‘What?!’ Petrov’s voice suddenly lifted in pitch.
‘Five launches, in progress, um, somewhere in the Mid-West.’ Petrov removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. Five?
‘Five? You’re sure? Five?’
‘Yes, sir, just five.’ It was the first time the technician had sounded confident. Denisov stepped one pace to his right and glared over the shoulder of the next technician in line.
‘Brusilov. Confirm what Lieutenant Saiga is reporting.’
‘It’s the same, sir.’
‘Run a full systems check. Now. And do it fast.’ All of the technicians answered and immediately a flurry of fingers flashed across a bank of keyboards. Surely not. The crews were working admirably fast, Petrov couldn’t help but be pleased, but then, there really was nothing better to do than train...
‘All systems are showing correct, sir.’ Fuck.
‘How long? What’s the ETA?’
‘Uh... about... 15 minutes.’ Long enough to check again.
‘Check again.’ Again the fingers flew over the keys. There was a palpable tension; it was like someone in the room was trying not to cry. Petrov couldn’t have said whether it was the tension, the fact that everyone had trained for so very long for this to happen or the wailing of the sirens.
‘All systems are showing correct, sir.’ Fuck. What’s the procedure? Petrov knew exactly what to do, of course, but his mind played for time. On the wall, a large, heavily constructed phone was bolted onto the concrete. It had just one button. Petrov carefully stepped over to it. He knew what would happen. He knew like they all knew. This is it. Petrov picked it up, but he hesitated. This was going to be nuclear war, after all. It was an open secret that the CCCP defences were on the barest edge of a hair-trigger. One push and Schoooom! a hundred hundred missiles would blast into space: to Europe; to Australia; to America. Why?
NATO were the enemy, of course. NATO were the West; they called themselves Free World. Well, maybe they were, but everyone always thought that they were the ‘good guys’. Petrov wasted a few more precious seconds considering the options. He gnawed on his knuckle and shifted his feet in his uncomfortable boots.
‘Check again.’ A third time the keyboards rattled as the code was searched for the vital clue. Saiga turned in his chair and reported again that all was normal. Petrov didn’t really hear. Saiga awkwardly caught the eye of Petrov.
‘Sir, we need to,’ he sighed heavily, ‘we need to retaliate. There is only just enough time to laun-’
‘Shut up!’ They are doing exercises. But they do every year. Every year. NATO, the great enemy, every year. But why? Why just five? Why launch now? Why? Why? Why? ‘What are the ground radar reports?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
Everyone in Russia knew that the Nazis had invaded without warning. Everyone knew that Russia wasn’t going to be caught napping again. Surely not again. On sang the sirens and the alarms, injecting sickening urgency to a diabolical situation.
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
‘How far away now?’
‘7 minutes.’
‘How many?’
‘Still just five, sir.’ Why only five? Petrov searched his mind for a reason. Could it be some new super-weapon? Could it be a mistake?
‘Five minutes now, sir. I am obliged to tell you that the window for retaliation is quite small now, sir. Uh, probably only about 10% of our missiles could get through and the defence system will need two minutes to prepare to launch.’
Fuck off.
‘Wait. Do not touch that phone.’ What are the odds? Everyone knows there’s no point launching just five missiles. Everyone knows that the retaliation would be too strong. Everyone knows that. Maybe it’s just an accident. Maybe it’s a mistake? Petrov knew perfectly well what he was officially forbidden to notice: the Soviet system was creaking, literally and figuratively, and the missile defence satellites had lagged behind the West...
What do I do? What do I do? Petrov knew what he was supposed to do. Call Stavka and advise them to launch. Everything. Every single rocket, every single missile, every single silo, every submarine, every bomber, every satellite was destined for combat. Every single thought in the Russian military waited for him. It can’t be right. It can’t be right. No. It can’t be just five. I have to stop. What if it’s not... what if it’s just a mistake... what if... what if it’s is a launch?
‘Where is it headed?’
‘Um. I, uh, think they ought to arrive about 300 miles to the East of Leningrad.’ Saiga breathed out explosively. ‘3 minutes, sir. It’s now or never.’ Petrov wanted to take his pistol and shoot the man, but instead he just held the silent phone to his ear and glared at the wall.
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
‘Two minutes. The chance to retaliate is... gone.’ It sounded like a death sentence. Petrov imagined a missile. High, oh so high, breaking up into smaller warheads. It couldn’t be stopped now. Arcing gracefully, the weapons would sweep towards the silos. Targets that had been programmed in some twenty years ago; always in the hope that they’d never be used.
‘One minute, sir.’ Waiting. ’30 seconds.’ Saiga took a deep breath and counted down.
‘20’ A tiny stopwatch in Petrov’s head began to whirr down.
‘10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...’ Petrov looked over to Saiga. ‘Impact.’
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
A long moment passed in the bunker. Petrov looked at the phone in his hand. Any second now the messages would come through: ‘how did this happen? Launch! Launch now!’ some general would be shuffling out of bed and screaming. Somewhere, maybe in lots of places, a great white flower of flame would blossom on a horizon and the populace would know that it had come at last. People would be burned in their beds. Crying and screaming and running all about. Maybe ten minutes. He knew that the Soviets were ready for an outcome like this. He knew that independent commands all across the CCCP would be preparing to launch once the world knew that the West had launched first.
Ten minutes came and went.
Twenty minutes came and went.
The alarms all at once ceased and it sounded all too quiet. The screens still shouted their message, but it didn’t seem so worrying without the alarm calls. The lights clicked back to their usual sickly green.
Предупреждение! Предупреждение! Предупреждение!
‘Saiga! Report!’
‘Uh...’
‘Are we at nuclear war? Seismic activity? Fallout? Air raids?’ But Petrov was already acting, because he already knew. He laughed. ‘Fuck me, lads. I think we got away with it.’
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General Yury Votintsev, who was in command of the Soviet Air Defence’s Missile Defence Units, wrote a memoir that told the whole story in the 1990s. Petrov had averted a war in 1983. It would have been the last war, but it wasn’t. Later reports confirmed that the signal deteced by the Soviet missile defence system had, in fact, been the reflection of a cloud and it was Petrov’s disbelief in a small scale missile attack that had effectively averted the end of the world. The Soviet Union only lasted 7 more years, but it was 1983 that nearly saw the early end. Had the Russian system not been so stupendously out of date, so stupendously poorly made and had the organs of state themselves not been so paranoid and inefficient, Petrov might never have been known. As it was, his coolness earned him promotion, a commendation from the UN and the lifelong gratitude of the US. Petrov’s ‘correct actions’ were initially praised, but he found himself with only paperwork in the future.
