You probably owe this man your life.

[theweaselking]

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov

25 years ago today. If you were alive then and you're alive now, you owe it to him.

Comments

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

That's totally cool. Thanks for the pointer.

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

Wow. I had no idea. I know almost nothing about the cold war. Thank you very much for sharing.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Blame Charlie Stross (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/09/25_years_ago_this_man_saved_my.html). I'd forgotten it was today.

[jagash.livejournal.com]

I wasn't, but wouldn't have been born due to nuclear war. Thanks for the info.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, you're young. I keep forgetting!

I feel old.

[jagash.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm glad that I pass for an old guy. :P

[canid-anubis.livejournal.com]

I always love hearing that story. Thanks for the reminder :)
People always wonder what difference can one person make? Clearly this is one of the best examples that the is.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Oh! It's The Russian Guy Didn't Push The Button Day again already? Thanks, Russian guy!

[kadath.livejournal.com]

That is so not one of my icons.

*confusion*

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That happened to me once. It was weird, then it fixed, then it happened again and i lost my icon permanently. I suspect there's some corruption in LJ's icon DB.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

It's listed as a known issue. I tried their fix ("clear your cache!"), which of course didn't work, so I opened a support ticket.

I have the icon saved locally, so no big deal, really, except the shock of seeing Blurry Manic Grinning Dude.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Hmm, i saw Kusanagi, not Blurry Manic Grinning Dude. Stupid LJ.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

A smiling Kusanagi? That's what it's supposed to be.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Whoever the hell "Kusanagi" is, if this is her, that's what we see:

[kadath.livejournal.com]

That's what you're supposed to see, but this is what I'm seeing:



(Kusanagi is the main character in Ghost in the Shell.)

[matgb]

It's an issue with the content delivery network interface where they sometimes are picking up the wrong pick. Every time it's happened to me or a friend I've hit hard refresh and it's been solved, weird it didn't work for you.

Leave it till tomorrow then reload. Admittedly I'd be pretty scared if that appeared as my icon, ouch, poor ugly dude.

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Oh, good-- it will come back? I'm not too keen on stupid jelly hand holding stupid jelly eyeball.

[matgb]

I'm seeing a black and white pick with a pink tinted scorpion being held out. No jelly there at all. Try hitting ctrl+f5

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

That's what it's supposed to be! Hurrah.

[caerlas.livejournal.com]

As a child I had no #$%^ing clue how close we were to a nuclear holocaust at all. If I had known I would have had ulcers by age 8. I first heard about this a couple years ago. Stories like this make me realize we're never far from losing everything. I'm glad the Soviets hired some wise people to handle their nukes. I hope to god that our people sitting by the buttons are more qualified than our executives are.

[the-paco.livejournal.com]

People sometimes talk as if the Cold War was a good thing. Our past 8 years of telling the world to pity and help, then shut up and follow, then keep quiet and deal was bad. Now that combined now with Medvedev and Putin starting to do some shoving of their own makes me worry that we've already forgotten what measures we 'lived' under for all those decades.

Sure, we got teflon, microwaves, kevlar, and the internet out of the deal. Was it worth a few thousand ulcers for a few thousand men, with the possibility of the oft-imagined unimaginable had one of them not been there, rolling the dice with our world?

[jasmine-koran.livejournal.com]

Jesus. Never knew that. That's pretty amazing.

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

Wow. It's hard to conceive just how much we owe that man.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I grew up expecting to die in a flash of light on any given day. It was normal.

Fuckin' kids. Get off my lawn.

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder.

[kakita-tsuna.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder, although I'm quite afar from the USA.

I am sure someone was whispering in his ear "Don't push the button, I'm sure it's a mistake"

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

I was a SAC crew chief (aircraft mechanic: B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers), a few years after that. We knew that if something happened, our planes would take off and 30 minutes later, we'd be pasted. There's a certain fatality after going through a couple alerts and watching your planes fly off, wondering if it's the real thing. Now, being under that kind of stress, only having the command requirements to respond, man, I don't know how he did it. But I definitely raise a toast to him. A true hero of the people. All the people!

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

That man is awesome, and so is his dog.

I grew up expecting to hear the sirens any minute calling us to the bomb shelters. My plan was to run the other way.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jeremiad/]

I had no idea.

I'm 24. The Cold War feels more like ancient history to me than WWII does.

Thanks for posting.