I am listening to an extraordinary podcast (see below).
First though, a couple of preliminaries for those who don’t know.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis there was a Soviet submarine with nukes being depth charged by the Americans. Communications with Moscow were lost, the temperature was rising because the air-conditioning was on the blink and the submarine was being buffeted by explosions. The captain said “we have to assume the war has started and fire our missiles.” His second in command was willing. But the third person required, executive officer Vasily Arkhipov (by all accounts a very cool customer) insisted they should not.
And that’s why human “civilisation” continued.
In late September 1983, a few weeks after the KAL-007 shootdown (the Russians shot down a commercial jetliner that was waaaaay off-course and flying over highly-sensitive areas and forcing the Russians to switch on all their sneaky radar stuff). Stanislav Petrov is on duty at the Soviet National Missile Defence Centre, 100km south of Moscow, always on the look out for incoming American missiles. The radar picked up five incoming missiles. He was supposed to get on the phone to his superiors for them to make their decision (which is almost certainly gonna be “we retaliate!”) He doesn’t, because he thinks the Americans would launch more than five. There are three waves of these alarms, over 25 minutes. Petrov waits, and then it becomes apparent that the glitchy system is glitchy (afterwards there is speculation that the radar picked up bounces off clouds).
And that’s why human “civilisation” continued.
But the podcast (got there in the end) reveals that Petrov might have been radioactive ash by then. In the immediate aftermath of the KAL-007 shootdown the area was absolutely crowded with American and Soviet planes and ships. Everyone was very tense, obviously. According to the interviewee on the podcast Cold War Conversations,, Brian Morra, who was an American captain at the time, the Americans overheard a kill order to some Migs and alerted the target – an EP-3 reconnaissance plane which took the only evasive action it could – diving from 20,000 feet to wave-top level and hoping to get “lost” from the Migs’ (relatively crappy) radar. Two hours later an the order went to shoot down another plane, a Japanese television plane that was taking footage of the crash site etc. Here’s where it gets fascinating. 38 minutes in –
“and the Soviet Air defence system identified the [Japanese] plane as a border violator, which is also why they tried to shoot down the EP-3; they mis-identified it as a border violator. It did the same thing about two hours later with [Japanese] plane. And they sent two different MIG-23s up to shoot that plane down. And that situation was defused by a young Russian pilot who’s anonymous to history. He was the flight-lead of those two MIG-23s. He identified the aircraft correctly as a civilian television plane. And he basically said ‘Are you sure you want me to shoot?’ And they said ‘Yes, we’re sure, it’s a border violator. You have your orders; shoot it down.’ And this young pilot then responded ‘We’re low on fuel. We’re returning to base.’ (laughs).
Holy shit.
And that’s why human “civilisation” continued.
marchudson.net 
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