Sep 262016
 

Petrov Day

  2 Responses to “9/26 is Petrov Day”

  1. I forget about the date every year. I don’t forget that the occasion exists and that there were in fact multiple events that almost started a nuclear war during the cold war. Here’s another one:

    http://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826

    tl;dr: An american missile base in okinawa receives instructions with a code that matches the one they had. This meant they were instructed to launch their 32 nuclear missiles.
    However there were three things that felt off to the commanding officer: They were “only” on DEFCON 2, not DEFCON 1, some of the targets weren’t in Russia and they found it unlikely that such an important order would have been tacked to the end of a weather report.
    One lieutenant ordered his men to proceed with the launch operations and that apparently was only stopped by sending over armed foot soldiers to stop the launch, with lethal force if necessary, at least until they got more confirmation from HQ that they REALLY were supposed to launch.
    A little while later HQ ordered them to stop the launch. What caused the erronous instructions to be sent in the first place hasn’t become clear (at least not in the article).

    • Oh man. I’ve heard of a couple of these, but this is the first time I heard of the Okinawa incident. If Petrov Day had a Krampus, it would be that lieutenant. >:(

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