What if Stanislav Petrov had launched a USSR nuclear retaliation to the received reports of incoming US missiles, at the height of 1980s Cold War mutual mistrust?

It is well-known that the world may at times have been close to nuclear war, for example during the Cuban missile crisis. It is less well-known that the world has only very narrowly indeed escaped accidental nuclear war.

Many of the counterfactuals considered in these Substacks of mine are ‘positive’: they are attempts to imagine how a better world really could have been possible, if only certain things had been done different. This piece is a definite exception: it considers how close ‘we’ came to destroying the world altogether in 1983. It imagines how history would have played out utterly differently, had it not been for one man’s bravery and good sense. In particular, his willingness to disobey procedure.

This cautionary tale imagines what would have eventuated had one Soviet colonel followed protocol.