Stanislav Petrov day
Sep. 26th, 2009 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Expanding on my Facebook status update.
You know what?
Fuck Talk Like A Pirate Day. It was funny, like, once, but as a person who actually is interested in history and language, it's mostly just horribly annoying. Most people can't handle the second person intimate to save themselves, and haven't the slightest idea about archaic verbs and just mash words together, which is only funny the first time one person does it. Annually is too often. It should be, like, once a decade. Actually, just once would've been fine.
But whatever.
So today is the 26th anniversary of the day the world almost ended. I had heard about this incident before, but I had never paid attention to the date. I just registered "Cold War". Understand, I was born in late 1979. I don't remember the Cold War that well. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down. But I was 8 or 9. I don't really remember what that meant, and it is very easy for me to think of the Cold War as something that affected my parents, not me.
But I was four years old in 1983. I have memories, albeit hazy, from that year. Twenty-six years ago I was going to Pre-K in Mechanicville. My sister wore thick blue-rimmed glasses and rode the bus to kindergarten. I had a pink dress with butterfly sleeves and a circle skirt that twirled when I did. I had a one-year-old sister and a five-year-old sister (who both had birthdays coming up in December). I had a kitty named Cupcake and a puppy named Biscuit. My house was green and I had a tricycle and lived on a dead-end dirt road with trees on both sides.
This is me in the summer of '83.
Knowing that if historical events had gone wrong, I would never have existed, is much different than realizing that if historical events had gone wrong, I would have died. If Stanislav Petrov had believed the sensors that had detected an incoming missle bound for Moscow, and had obeyed his standing orders that decreed he should unleash total nuclear destruction upon every major US city... The odds are very good that I would have died in relatively short order. I lived in a rural area, but it came out later that one of the targets on the Soviet Top 50 list was the Watervliet Arsenal, about 15 miles away from my house. Petrov's orders probably included nuking that target. My parents were sort of survivalists, but my father was back in the National Guard then, and may well have been called away. Mom grew much of our produce in those years, but she did more freezing than canning-- if the power grid was taken out, the chest freezer full of that summer's food would only have lasted a matter of days. By the end of September, much of that year's freezing would have already been done. And three little ones would be difficult to keep alive. I can't imagine what really would have happened. I can't believe I would have survived it. Maybe my parents would have, maybe my older sister, but not all three of us.
So I'd rather have a day commemorating that man who saved millions of lives and for it, was forcibly retired and suffered a nervous breakdown, than a day wherein everyone makes stupid pirate jokes. Maybe it's selfish of me to only suddenly care so much about history when I realize it directly affected me -- 1983!-- but I do.
Edited to add:
Of course I had to look it up. Seriously, don't click that link. But the conclusion?
A 1-megaton warhead on Watervliet would have killed four-year-old me in a matter of hours with a well-over-lethal dose of radiation, after about a 40% chance of wiping out my Gram and uncle (in Troy) on impact. The cities of Troy, Watervliet, Waterford, Cohoes, all would have been wiped out. The site of my childhood home, in the rural township of Schaghticoke, would have been too hot for human habitation until 1993, the year I started high school.
The radiation from that blast would seriously sicken people as far away as Buffalo, where I live now-- five hours' drive on the Thruway-- and Boston. Which certainly could have received its own warhead in the meantime.
Had Watervliet been spared, we were still well within the range of dangerous radiation from New York City, which would have been enough to poison a small child like me within days, possibly weeks if the wind blew strongly and carried the fallout toward Europe instead.
Oh my God. You can't hide from that under a fuckin' desk.No wonder my parents' generation are all whacked. God bless you, Stanislav Petrov. God or whatever you like bless you.
*
Unrelatedly, I just finally looked up something that's been bothering me for years. As a kid I had a tape player and some tapes, and there was a box set of Great Classical Music or whatever. One of the pieces on it was the Adagio of Somethingorother, subtitled "Theme from Motion Picture Gallipoli". For years I tried to remember what it was called, so I could get another copy-- of course I've no hope of finding those tapes anywhere. I vaguely thought it was by Bach, but wasn't sure.
I finally thought, today, to Google "Gallipoli Soundtrack". And thus I stumbled upon the fascinating and slightly sordid tale of Albinoni's Adagio, the supposed provenance for which is, after all, fictional. It was composed in 1957, Wikipedia claims. (Listen here-- I promise you've heard it before. You too can smack yourself in the forehead and say, oh that one! In a masterpiece of laziness, however, I am not going to look up the Wikipedia page again-- I navigated away from it to find the YouTube link I just put in above, instead, and don't want to hit 'back' because I'm listening to it now. Perhaps if you search for it, you'll find better info than I did.)
I am sad to find out it's become a cliché, though. I loved it dearly when I was 13. I still like it. This Berlin Philharmonic version is about half the tempo of the recording I loved so dearly, however, and it makes it even more ridiculously over-the-top melodramatic. The version I have living in my brain is brisk yet tragic, and has an absolutely beautiful, resonant bassline throughout. Not an organ, I don't think-- I think it's all pizzicato bass strings. I've no way of looking up what orchestra it was, though; I don't remember anything about the tape except that the case was yellow and there were maybe four or six tapes in the box set.
You know what?
Fuck Talk Like A Pirate Day. It was funny, like, once, but as a person who actually is interested in history and language, it's mostly just horribly annoying. Most people can't handle the second person intimate to save themselves, and haven't the slightest idea about archaic verbs and just mash words together, which is only funny the first time one person does it. Annually is too often. It should be, like, once a decade. Actually, just once would've been fine.
But whatever.
So today is the 26th anniversary of the day the world almost ended. I had heard about this incident before, but I had never paid attention to the date. I just registered "Cold War". Understand, I was born in late 1979. I don't remember the Cold War that well. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down. But I was 8 or 9. I don't really remember what that meant, and it is very easy for me to think of the Cold War as something that affected my parents, not me.
But I was four years old in 1983. I have memories, albeit hazy, from that year. Twenty-six years ago I was going to Pre-K in Mechanicville. My sister wore thick blue-rimmed glasses and rode the bus to kindergarten. I had a pink dress with butterfly sleeves and a circle skirt that twirled when I did. I had a one-year-old sister and a five-year-old sister (who both had birthdays coming up in December). I had a kitty named Cupcake and a puppy named Biscuit. My house was green and I had a tricycle and lived on a dead-end dirt road with trees on both sides.
This is me in the summer of '83.Knowing that if historical events had gone wrong, I would never have existed, is much different than realizing that if historical events had gone wrong, I would have died. If Stanislav Petrov had believed the sensors that had detected an incoming missle bound for Moscow, and had obeyed his standing orders that decreed he should unleash total nuclear destruction upon every major US city... The odds are very good that I would have died in relatively short order. I lived in a rural area, but it came out later that one of the targets on the Soviet Top 50 list was the Watervliet Arsenal, about 15 miles away from my house. Petrov's orders probably included nuking that target. My parents were sort of survivalists, but my father was back in the National Guard then, and may well have been called away. Mom grew much of our produce in those years, but she did more freezing than canning-- if the power grid was taken out, the chest freezer full of that summer's food would only have lasted a matter of days. By the end of September, much of that year's freezing would have already been done. And three little ones would be difficult to keep alive. I can't imagine what really would have happened. I can't believe I would have survived it. Maybe my parents would have, maybe my older sister, but not all three of us.
So I'd rather have a day commemorating that man who saved millions of lives and for it, was forcibly retired and suffered a nervous breakdown, than a day wherein everyone makes stupid pirate jokes. Maybe it's selfish of me to only suddenly care so much about history when I realize it directly affected me -- 1983!-- but I do.
Edited to add:
Of course I had to look it up. Seriously, don't click that link. But the conclusion?
A 1-megaton warhead on Watervliet would have killed four-year-old me in a matter of hours with a well-over-lethal dose of radiation, after about a 40% chance of wiping out my Gram and uncle (in Troy) on impact. The cities of Troy, Watervliet, Waterford, Cohoes, all would have been wiped out. The site of my childhood home, in the rural township of Schaghticoke, would have been too hot for human habitation until 1993, the year I started high school.
The radiation from that blast would seriously sicken people as far away as Buffalo, where I live now-- five hours' drive on the Thruway-- and Boston. Which certainly could have received its own warhead in the meantime.
Had Watervliet been spared, we were still well within the range of dangerous radiation from New York City, which would have been enough to poison a small child like me within days, possibly weeks if the wind blew strongly and carried the fallout toward Europe instead.
Oh my God. You can't hide from that under a fuckin' desk.
*
Unrelatedly, I just finally looked up something that's been bothering me for years. As a kid I had a tape player and some tapes, and there was a box set of Great Classical Music or whatever. One of the pieces on it was the Adagio of Somethingorother, subtitled "Theme from Motion Picture Gallipoli". For years I tried to remember what it was called, so I could get another copy-- of course I've no hope of finding those tapes anywhere. I vaguely thought it was by Bach, but wasn't sure.
I finally thought, today, to Google "Gallipoli Soundtrack". And thus I stumbled upon the fascinating and slightly sordid tale of Albinoni's Adagio, the supposed provenance for which is, after all, fictional. It was composed in 1957, Wikipedia claims. (Listen here-- I promise you've heard it before. You too can smack yourself in the forehead and say, oh that one! In a masterpiece of laziness, however, I am not going to look up the Wikipedia page again-- I navigated away from it to find the YouTube link I just put in above, instead, and don't want to hit 'back' because I'm listening to it now. Perhaps if you search for it, you'll find better info than I did.)
I am sad to find out it's become a cliché, though. I loved it dearly when I was 13. I still like it. This Berlin Philharmonic version is about half the tempo of the recording I loved so dearly, however, and it makes it even more ridiculously over-the-top melodramatic. The version I have living in my brain is brisk yet tragic, and has an absolutely beautiful, resonant bassline throughout. Not an organ, I don't think-- I think it's all pizzicato bass strings. I've no way of looking up what orchestra it was, though; I don't remember anything about the tape except that the case was yellow and there were maybe four or six tapes in the box set.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Agreed
Date: 2009-09-26 10:30 pm (UTC)I also have heard about the day that "Dr. Strangelove" almost got acted out on us. Scary! I am older, and I remember seeing those "fallout shelter" signs in every building, and being told to get under the desk if the sirens went off. My dad would just laugh and say that if, God forbid, something like that did happen, the lucky ones would be the ones at ground zero who didn't have to live through the aftermath. I am glad that this fellow used reason and logic instead of mindlessly following orders. He SHOULD have a special day holiday.
Re: Agreed
Date: 2009-09-26 10:45 pm (UTC)It creeps me the hell out to imagine what would have happened. I don't know how big their Ground Zero would be-- we were a healthy 150 miles or so away from NYC, but only fifteen miles from the Arsenal.
I don't know why I'm looking this up (http://www.nationalterroralert.com/nuclear/). But suffice to say, if you're within 6 miles of a thermonuclear blast, and outdoors, you will have 3rd-degree burns.
A bomb hitting Watervliet would, it's safe to say, take out the majority of the New York State government. Which, you may not know, is the entity that responded to the 9/11 disaster so efficiently in NYC. We have among the most corrupt state governments in the nation, but nobody fucks with our disaster-preparedness. My dad was one of the NYS Office of General Services pencil-pushers from about 1978 until 2004, when he retired-- he spent several months in a bunker in Albany in late 2001, making sure relief workers had dust masks and bottled water and, later, bulldozers.
But if Watervliet got toasted, there would be no help for NYC.
It's creepy to consider.
I had to stop reading that link, above, so I don't know if I would have been killed right off the bat or would have died of radiation poisoning in the ensuing weeks or made it to winter to die of starvation or exposure. Odds are very poor that I'd've made it to 30, though, like I have. So I don't think there are really words to express the debt I, at the least, owe Mr. Petrov.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-27 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-27 02:33 am (UTC)