Ivana Hughes

And to me, it's just unfathomable.

To me, the idea that we're kind of putting all of our eggs in this nuclear deterrence basket, when we actually recognize that things could go wrong,

Not just deliberately, not just because someone decided to implement the strike, but because accidents could happen, because a miscalculation could happen.

Besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, besides these absolutely ridiculous, stupid accidents in the 50s and even the 60s.

In the 1980s, we had two incidents in 1983, the first one in September, the second one in November, where we quite literally, you know, could have had the start of a nuclear war.

One was called Abel Archer.

That was in November.

That was a NATO exercise that had become they had begun.

actually added some new kind of elements of realism that were interpreted then by the Soviets for the real thing.

They thought they were under attack.

They started quite literally, you know, putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to attack.

And thankfully that was, it didn't go all the way.

In September, there was an incident where,

An officer in the Soviet army in some military base that was monitoring whether the Soviet Union was under attack received literally like a computer glitch alert.

Five signals in a row that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.

And it turns out those glitches came from an alignment between high altitude clouds and satellites.

So something that had not been predicted or accounted for.

And according to the computers, the Soviet Union was under attack.

This person, his name was...

Captain Stanislav Petrov had decided this was a false alarm and actually, you know, didn't pass the information on to his superiors, thus averting attention.