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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

I thought there was some russian commander who avoided a direct command to launch missles, and it turned out the command to launch was a mistake made by some other russian entity relying on faulty data. Seems as close to a "button" scenario as one could've had.

edit - point being that, at least in this case, in 1983, it contradicts the claim in the article that these "systems aren't centralized", and "requires a lot more activity, spread out across a vast geographical area". I'm sure it's better in current times.

*edit - oh, I thought he had the power to launch himself - I guess it changes slightly if his job was only "to report" up the chain of command.

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There was also the B-59 incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis[1], when a Soviet sub -- its officers exhausted, out of contact with Moscow, and uncertain if war had broken out -- almost launched a nuclear torpedo against US forces.

XO Vasily Arkhipov, who had also been XO on the infamous K-19, was the only officer to oppose launching the sub's nuclear payload, and since launch required positive agreement from the Captain, XO and political officer, Arkhipov literally stopped World War Three by himself.

[1](http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/)

I wonder, are there any stories where the "Political Officer" is actually the hero rather than the villain?

Well, I'm sure the Soviets printed quite a few. :) Actually, the role of the Soviet political officer (zampolit) was by then subordinated to the commanding officer -- political officers were expected to function as field officers (pilots, artillery officers, and so on), in addition to political education, morale-raising, and individual counseling. They also had specific authority over Communist Party members within units, who basically operated something like senior NCOs. In practice, I think, the zampolit system operated relatively smoothly -- the Red Army was never able to get rid of the political officers (Zhukov tried, and even he couldn't do it!), but they were able to effectively defang the position by being orthodox Communists themselves, and by insisting that political education not compromise practical competency.

>not compromise practical competency.

There's a quote from The Last Sentry[1] regarding this:

"On major combatant vessels, the political officer was third in command, following the captain and his starpom (short for stariy pomoshnik, or senior assistant), who was the equivalent of an executive officer in the U.S. Navy. The zampolit was required to qualify as an underway watch officer like any other officer on the ship and so had to have some operational competence."

I'm pretty sure that training and working with the regular crew would weaken the dedication to "The Party" over time.

[1]: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pThlAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT15&o...

IIRC in the past, there were multiple occassions in which a "button" being pressed in error might have started nuclear war. But I think the guy you are talking about is Stanislav Petrov[1] who is known for preventing nuclear war in 1983[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm...

Its not entirely clear that Petrov prevented a nuclear war. His job (which he choose not to do) was to report detected missiles up the chain of command. In theory, the Soviet Union policy was to require multiple-source warnings before retaliating, in which case they still would not have launched anything. In practice, they very well might neglected to follow this procedure and proceed to retaliate.

I remember an interview (will try to find a source) where they told an anecdotal story about Petrov.

Some years after the incident, Petrov told he believed that the system at his station was showing a false alarm and wanted to wait for a confirmation from other stations. He is cited with not wanting to sting a bee-hive.

After being introduced the information present at the other stations (most if not all were seeing the same false-alarm) he told the interviewer that if he would have had this "information" at the time of the incident he'd probably decided otherwise.

That's the Petrov story, which has legs, but doesn't seem very important to me. Essentially, he was using some new equipment and saw 5 incoming missiles. He decided against acting upon that information as he saw it, rightfully, as a bug. He may have gotten into some trouble with his superiors, but I imagine that has a lot more to do with the face-saving bureaucracy of the USSR than a readiness to launch with such limited information.

There must be a mountain of research into false positives of launches and more false positives than we know. After the fall of the USSR we found that that this happened practically regularly. I believe the Soviets saw the Able Archer exercises in 1983 as a potential attack and even detected missile launches. We also found out that Castro was ready to start nuclear war until his Soviet masters explained to him what that really means.

This is also why nuclear launch approval tends to be from the head of state only, instead of an automated process or via lower level delegates.

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