Happy Petrov Day

Eneasz

Happy Petrov Day — LessWrong

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Note that Petrov suffered very few consequences after the initial backlash. His US counterpart Harold Hering was discharged from the Air Force, drove a truck for a while to make ends meet and watched his personal life crumble, for asking the question

How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?"

I don't know if his stand forced any changes in the missile launch protocols, but I admire his courage to take his oath literally and seriously and his refusal to back down under pressure from his superiors more than Petrov's 5 min of agonizing over a decision to disobey a faulty computer algorithm he himself helped design.

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Lumifer11y-10

Note that Petrov suffered very few consequences after the initial backlash. His US counterpart Harold Hering was discharged from the Air Force,

Hering is not Petrov's counterpart.

Petrov, basically, said "This technical system is generating an erroneous result, I'm not going to accept it". Hering said "I will obey an order from a superior officer only if I decide it makes sense".

6WhyAsk11y

Thanks for the Hering link. I, too, got into a dispute with the USAF but did considerably better and there was a lot less at stake. True to form for whistleblowers, a Lt. Col. who tried to help me on a related issue got sent to Taiwan. The punishment is worse for higher-ups because they should have known better by then. Decades later, in my response to questioning how to sue a government agency for negligence, a lawyer told me "No one can sue the King." Questioning a King's sanity, or competence, may be worse than suing.

9MarsColony_in10years11y

Thanks for the link to Harold Hering's article. I just read it, as well as the one on Stanislav Petrov. Vasili Arkhipov's Wikipedia article is also worth reading. Although most Russian nuclear submarines required only the captain's order to launch, he was the only one of the three officers on his sub to vote against launching their nukes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Due to his position as Flotilla commander, he was able to win the argument with the submarine's captain, who wanted to launch.

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