Stanislav Petrov and the RCSG Resolute

In this episode, Badass of the week website creator Ben and professor of history Dr. Pat Larash discuss two badasses who were put in massively-stressful life-threatening situations and proved their badassitude by resolutely resolving to do... nothing. The RCSG Resolute, an antarctic icebreaker faced with seizure by the flagship destroyer of the Venezuelan Navy, and Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the USSR's early-warning nuclear detection service each faced their own unique crises, and each was forced to remain steadfast even in the face of almost certain death.

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Episode Transcript:

Stanislav sits in front of the control panel, staring at a bunch of blinking lights and dials, daydreaming about the bowl of borscht he’s going to eat later.. It’s another day in paradise (sarcasm). Maybe it’s time for a smoke break He thinks? Then...

Beep...beep...beep… (READ ONE VERSION WHERE YOU MAKING BEEPING SOUNDS AND ONE VERSION WHERE YOU DON’T AND WE WILL INSERT IN POST)

Oh shit.

That’s not his microwave popcorn going off. That’s...

beep...beep...beep...

...the USSR’s early-warning ballistic missile detection system, and...

...beep....beep...beep...

those beeps… mean incoming nukes.

But is this really World War III? Or some kind of of technical malfunction. Lietuenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov stares at the big red launch button on his control panel. He has three minutes to decide.

Ben [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson and I am here, as always with my co-host, Dr. Pat. Larry. Pat, how are you doing today? Doing okay. How are you, Ben? Doing okay. We have kind of a fun set of stories today. Usually on this show, we would like to talk about people who went above and beyond the call of duty. They did these amazing acts of heroism that were far beyond anything in their job descriptions. But today, we're going to be doing something a little different. We're going to be talking about two characters who didn't do the thing they were supposed to do and were badass because of it. And this first one that we're going to talk about is one that is it has a very dear place in my heart, because when I originally wrote this article for the website, I was supposed to be going on a cruise. I had bought this cruise of the Adriatic that I wanted to go on. And, you know, I've been waiting for it for a year.

Pat [00:01:55] Sounds nice.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was really excited about going and visiting all of these amazing places. And then about a month before I was supposed to go on the cruise, COVID happened and it shut down. Oh, bummer. Cruises. And, you know, the kind of world quarantine began. And then like a week later, a cruise ship did something bad ass. And I was like, I got to write about this. So what is this cruise ship and what did it do that was so bad? Well, you're going to find out what disobeying orders and cruise ships and badasses have in common. After this break. Okay, Welcome back to Badass of the Week. We are about to get into a bit of a different story today. I want to talk about the Royal Canadian Geographical Society ship The Resolute. So for starters, the ship is actually pretty hardcore. It is an Antarctic icebreaker. You know, basically you pay them 20 grand and they drive you around Antarctica to look at penguins and all that stuff. It's a cruise ship carries about 140 passengers. But on this particular day that we're going to talk about, there's only 32 people on board. It's a skeleton crew just kind of there's no bartenders, none of that stuff. It's just the crew driving the ship around. They're going to be taking it in to to get some service done on it. It is 1:00 in the morning on Monday, March 30th, 2020. And these 32 people are doing some open water engine maintenance en route from Buenos Aires to Dutch Curacao. They're 13 miles off the coast of La Tortuga, not the one in Haiti and not the one from the Michael Bolton song. And they are hailed by another ship.

It's the middle of the night. It's dark. These guys are sailing probably just by instrument, and they get a call from the Venezuelan warship Niigata. The message reads, You are in Venezuelan waters. Follow us to port at Margarita Island so you can be detained. Now Margarita Island in the Caribbean. It sounds pretty bad ass, but it's probably not that much fun because it is Venezuela and this is the Venezuelan navy. And yes, any kind of detainment sounds like a kind of a bad thing, right, Pat?

Pat: Yeah. I mean, any kind of detainment in any circumstances. And also, this is Venezuela. And let's talk about the situation in Venezuela. There's this guy, Nicolas Maduro, who is the president. He was Hugo Chavez's vice president. And when he won the election in 2018, he did so because he moved the election date up six months and then he banned all of the other political parties from voting. And he rules by decree in a lot of ways.

Ben: I think the bad guy in season two of the Jack Ryan show on Amazon Prime is based on him.

Pat: Hmm. Could be. Could very well be.

Ben: I mean, I'm pretty sure that Jim from the office just machine guns him. And that's how America deals with that problem in that show. But that's generally how Tom Clancy novels. Yes, that's generally how a lot of Tom Clancy novels end up. Yeah.

Pat: Yeah, that happens not to have happened in our actual timeline. So anyway, the guy that he ran against was recognized by 66 other countries as the president of Venezuela. But that didn't really have any practical effect because Maduro was living in the presidential palace. He had all the guns. And just a few weeks before the U.S. government declared that he was a dictator and a narco terrorist, and they put a $15 million bounty on his arrest or capture. And this guy is still in power, even though most countries still don't consider him legitimate. And he's also constantly complaining that, like the CIA and Colombia and everyone else and their uncle is trying to depose him, which might actually be true. And his only real friend right now is Putin. And yeah, that tracks.

Ben: So if you were a Royal Canadian Geographical Society ship minding your own business or trying to mind your own business in Venezuelan waters, you might try to find ways to not get involved. Yeah, this isn't the highway patrol pulling you over on I-95 at 6:00 in the afternoon. This is the the official Venezuelan story about these 32 members on board the ship was that they were, quote, mercenaries sent to attack Venezuelan bases. They must have been pretty bad ass mercenaries because 32 guys taking over an entire naval base seems kind of like something you'd see in a Tom Clancy novel.

Pat: Maybe they'd recruited some penguins.

Ben: I'm going to completely throw us off track here for a second to tell you about badass penguins. There's the most badass penguin is also in South America. It is the the Falkland Islands Penguin. There are not that many of them. They were extremely endangered in the early 1980s, and this war began. The Falkland Islands war was in 1982 between England and Argentina. The Argentineans put landmines throughout big swaths of the one of the Falkland Islands, I think South Falkland Island. And it was actually like the breeding grounds for these penguins.

Pat: Oh, no!

Pat: These little tiny Falkland Island penguins. Horrible. It's horrible. Except that the Falkland Island penguin, most land mines require a certain amount of weight and the Falkland Island penguin is not heavy enough to set off the landmine.

Ben: [00:07:41] And these things were extremely they were extremely close to being extinct. There was only less than 100 of them, I believe, alive at the time that this minefield was planted. And the penguins don't set off the landmines, but the seals that eat them do.

Pat: Oh

Ben: Pardon the pun, but the population of the Falkland Island penguin has kind of exploded in the last couple of decades.

Pat: I see what you did there.

Ben: They're no longer endangered. But let's get back into some serious shit here. We have 32 unarmed crew members of this cruise ship, and they are sailing it into Dutch, Curacao and the Caribbean to, like, get a drink and sit on a beach somewhere. And now Nicolas Maduro, narco terrorist, a Venezuela dictator, wanted for crimes all over the world. He is saying that these 32 ordinary sailors are international super spy Marines and he needs to detain them. And realistically, what we're looking at here is a situation where they would imprison these guys, keep them in prison for a few days or weeks. Who knows how long ransom the maximum back to the Royal Canadian Geological Society, which I imagine can't afford to them, but probably Canada will. Somebody is going to pay to bring these guys home so they don't just rot in a Venezuelan jail.

Pat: Or maybe Jack Ryan will rescue them.

Ben: Sure. Right. Maybe Jack Ryan, Maybe John Krasinski will parachute in and singlehandedly rescue them. Okay. You don't to be arrested as a as a terrorist by Nicolas Maduro. So the captain, he radios into home base with the situation, Hey, I got a problem here, guys. I don't know what you want me to do here.

So he just kind of maintains his course. He doesn't get a response. It's 1:00 in the morning in the Caribbean. I don't know what time that makes it in. Wherever his home office is. Could be in Europe, could be in Canada. Either way, whoever is on the other end of that radio isn't responding, but does respond is a 76 millimeter artillery shell fired from the Venezuelan warship Night Guardia fires across his bow just to really they're not trying to hit him, but they're shooting a warning shot at him to let him know, hey, pull over, pull the vehicle over to the to the shoulder, get your license and registration. Prepare to be boarded. So the captain radios back again to headquarters and he says, look, you know, international waters start at 12 miles off the coast of the land. And we are 13, 13 and a half miles off the coast of Venezuela. We are in international waters. No, I don't want to be considered mercenary or terrorist or whatever. Don't love the shooting. Things don't really want to be involved with this. But we are not wrong here. We are in the right. He checks his coordinates and he's he's he's right. One thing I think that the Venezuelans are not counting on is that the RC G as resolute is actually kind of a bad ass ship. It has already been arrested twice. How do you arrest a cruise ship or do you mean arrest the people on the cruise ship or what? Like the RC s resolute. You have the right to remain silent. Honestly, kind of. So. The ship was arrested in Nunavik in August of 2019, and there's a there's a quote from the guy, the arresting officer. He's none of it PD or whatever guy named Thomas Peyton.

[00:11:09] He said, quote, What stood out was that it was an actual cruise ship that needed to be arrested. This does not happen very often, end quote. So the ship was placed under arrest because the owners of the ship owed $100,000 to some company in Nova Scotia. Oops. And it was basically cops went on board and they held it until people paid their debts or work something out. And the ship was let was let free. The ship was arrested again under similar circumstances in November of 2019. She was in Buenos Aires and same thing owed money, was arrested by the Argentinean police and had to be ransom about again. And now the Venezuelans want to get in on this. The Resolute also pissed off a bunch of Save the Penguin nonprofits because it didn't pay them. And that is not bad. I know that is not bad. That is instead is just don't add. It's just bad break. Bad Ass of the Week podcast does not endorse not paying people for things that you said you were going to pay them for, especially when they are non-profits dedicated to saving penguins. Want to get that on the record, but this boat has already been arrested twice, which is, I think, more than the two of us combined, I would hope. Correct. I know about your I mean, I'm making certain assumptions here, but yeah, I think it's correct. The water is heavily armed. It's the flagship of the Venezuelan Navy being the biggest, baddest and most important ship of the Venezuelan navy. The commander of the Venezuelan Navy calls that his home base. It's the flagship. It has a 76 millimeter main cannon. It's got a couple of 12.7 millimeter anti-aircraft guns. And it carries something called the millennium gun, which sounds like some kind of super weapon from an anime about giant robots.

[00:12:45] But what is it? Actually, it's an anti missile shotgun. If somebody shoots missiles at it, it can kind of spray shocking at it to shoot down the missiles. Still. Millennium gun. Millennium gun. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. I hope that whoever was on like, the publicity department for the millennium gun got promoted. Okay, so let's recap. Our CSG resolute 32 guys on it never held a gun in their lives probably, or at least never fired one in anger. They are on an unarmed. Cruise ship. They have just been fired on by a 76 millimeter cannon. There are 44 Venezuelan sailors on board the Niigata. They are angry. They are yelling for the resolute to pull over. You are the resolute pack. What do you do in this situation? Knowing what we know about the Resolute being kind of a fuck the police kind of operation? How could I turn around and kind of sail away and just ignore the whole situation? Is that possible? What did the actual resolute do? The resolute? Going back to what we talked about in the open. It did nothing. It held its course completely straight. It was resolute. It was resolute. Just kept going straight to negative fires. A second warning shot. And then they fire a third warning shot. A 76 millimeter shell is big. It will knock out warships, forget about cruise ships, but the resolute continue straight. The knucklehead doesn't want to sink the ship. They they want to ransom it or investigate it or interrogate these people or whatever. So they try to ram it with their warship. I believe it's a destroyer. It's trying to ram the resolute, basically like a pit maneuver. Like if you were a cop trying to, like, pull somebody over.

[00:14:27] So they try to ram it to stop it and slow it down. The it bounces off. Okay. They try to ram it again. That doesn't work. Then they try to ram it a third time and they get all of like the Marines from the Venezuelan ship are on the deck now and they've all got their AK and they're firing them up in the air. The resolute still does not do anything. It's just going as fast as it can. Straight ahead, Not changing course in motion stays in motion. Exactly. So they're like, what? It gets annoyed and it tries to ram it up near the front. I have a question. Didn't you say that the Resolute was it was a cruise ship, but it's an Antarctic icebreaker. Isn't that kind of by definition something that, like, is good at smashing things? It's very good at smashing things, it turns out. Yes. This is an Antarctic ice breaker, which you probably don't encounter in the Caribbean that often. But, yes, let's talk about Antarctic ice breakers for a minute. The Resolute was built in 1993 in Finland. Its official ice breaker rating from the Finnish Swedish Maritime Administration is a one super. Ooh, good job. Literally, every story that you read about this refers to the front of the Resolute as having a, quote, bulbous prow. Bulbous prow. Yes, a super bulbous prow. I don't know if bulbous prow is some kind of is like an official nautical term, but it just sounds like something a British person would use to refer to their junk. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Okay. A-1, super bulbous prow, resolute. Going straight. It gets hit by the night. Guardia, which is a little smaller, is 80 meters long. It's not small. It's the flagship of the Venezuelan navy.

[00:16:08] But the resolute is about 50% bigger. It's 123 meters. And they hit. And this thing is designed to shear through things and it shears through the entire front end of the negative. Ooh. The ship starts to go down. All those 44 Marines who were shooting their is up in the air earlier. They all have to jump into the water. They're all trying to swim around with their life jackets on. Then they go to the prize of the Venezuelan navy, along with its famed millennium gun, are sinking to the bottom of the Caribbean. Ooh. And the resolute continues to not change course from the moral of the story here is that when you're packing large bore artillery on the front of your warship, you should probably practice social distancing. If we're going to go back to a COVID joke here. Use the big guns. Don't ram the ship that has two bars and a Jacuzzi on board and is designed for, like, smashing glaciers. Mm hmm. The the captain of the Resolute radioed to the guys in the water like, Hey, do you want some help? I didn't get a message back immediately and was like, Yeah, I'm just going to I'm just going to keep on going. I'm just going to keep rolling on to Chris Island. And they do. They roll straight on in the discurso, the negative capsizes, sinks, leaving the guys floating, and all 44 people are rescued. So nobody dies in this crew. Okay. In this situation here, I mean, I wasn't I wasn't rooting for the Venezuelan soldiers, but they probably were following orders and. Okay, whatever. No one got hurt. This story is less funny if it ends with 44 dead bodies, you know? Yeah. Yeah. The captain of the Resolute, he is who I can never find his name.

[00:17:49] And I really believe that it's to protect him from, like, revenge by the Venezuelans and Maduro, who he is. Like, as we talk. He is the kind of person who would seek that. Right. So I think you do have to protect this guy's identity. Yeah. He radios into the guys in the water like Haiti. Need any help? They don't respond. He radios some international maritime organization like, Hey, there's guys in the water back here. Let's send somebody to pick them up. But I really don't. These guys were just firing, you know, AK 47, fully automatic seven six to over a minute ago. I really don't want us to pull them all up onto my boat. On board. Yes. And immediately be outnumbered by armed men. Yeah. They get picked up by friendly forces later. Everybody is unhurt. Nobody dies. Nobody gets seriously injured, as far as I can tell. Venezuela accuses the resolute of piracy and terrorism. They say that the cruise ship was trying to hijack the night. Gwadar, Ry, 32, hardcore John Krasinski mercenaries on board the resolute, the hardcore penguin peepers. They were going to board and capture the millennium gun. They were going to attack a fully armed warship with armor plating, and they were going to attack a marine contingent that outnumbered their own guys. And yeah, sure. I mean, if that was true, then I would say that it was probably even more bad ass than we're giving it credit for. If that was their original plan was to board the night, go out and capture it for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, or maybe the Royal Canadian Geographic Society as a front. I think I like it better if they're just, Oh, yeah, you're some kind of league of extraordinary gentlemen kind of thing.

[00:19:31] Yeah. Yeah. So they actually video of all of this, if you want to go look it up, it's kind of interesting to watch. Anyway, that's kind of the end of the story. The Resolute shows up, they get attacked by a Venezuelan warship. They rip it in half with with their A-1 super bulbous prow, and they keep on going. And that's the end of the story. It's changed hands a few times since then. And as of the time of this recording, it is the flagship of heritage expeditions. You can go on it now. It's named the Heritage Adventurer, and they will they are offering Antarctic cruises. If you want to take a ride on a badass watch. And I maybe I should rephrase that. You can do that. Oh, yeah. Okay. So I'm not going to touch that. But while we're on the topic of disobeying orders, well, the topic of just staying the course, sitting tight. We'll talk about Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world after this break. So. Hey, welcome back, badasses. Let's time travel to September 1983. A Korean Airlines passenger jet had just strayed into Soviet airspace. The Soviet military thinking it was yet another U.S. spy plane shot it down just in case, killing 269 passengers and crew members. Meanwhile, in the USSR, Yuri Andropov is general secretary and he does not trust the U.S.. He's got his reasons. Even before the Korean passenger plane, the Soviets had learned about a U.S. aerial reconnaissance mission, and they were prone to interpret everything as just one hair away from a reason to retaliate. Tensions were high. Oh, yeah. It's the Cold War. Yeah. This is Cold War in the eighties. This isn't like spies in suits on the bridge in West Berlin.

[00:21:37] This is war games with Matthew Broderick. This is Top Gun with Maverick shooting down MiGs over the Mediterranean. This is a Red Dawn and invasion USA with Chuck Norris. This is that time period. So we are talking thermonuclear war. Hide under your desks. But with hairspray. So let's zoom in to a military bunker about 80 miles south of Moscow. This is Skripochka 50. Imagine like half a dozen or more huge blocks of Soviet concrete, each with a big white ominous looking sphere on top that houses all sorts of complicated, expensive equipment that you can use to talk to satellites that are zipping around the earth looking for other people's intercontinental ballistic missiles. And in one of these buildings, USSR Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is doing his thing. Maybe he's playing chess with a comrade. Maybe he's smoking a cigaret because it's 1983 and he gets a call. What's this all about? Petrov wonders. Military orders, no doubt. But what sort? Everyone's on edge right now, and he's stationed here at Supercar 15, The military bunker. That's the location of the Western center of the USSR is early warning ballistic missile detection system. On a good day, you hope for a lot of sitting around and nothing happening. Was this going to be a good day? He answers the call. Comrade Petrov. Duh. Turns out the usual guy couldn't make it in that day. So Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had to cover his shift for him. Remember, we're in the middle of the Cold War. There's nuclear threat arms race. The Soviets had a policy of mutually assured destruction. Yeah, and that sounds bad. And that is bad. Mutually assured destruction is very bad there. We're at a time where we're trying to have talks. The USSR and the United States are trying to have talks to like, you know, de-escalate things, but it's not working.

[00:23:40] And we're as close as we've been since the Cuban Missile crisis, really, to World War three and kind of the destruction of all life on earth as we know it, because mutually assured destruction is kind of the the failsafe of like. Look, if you want to do this, you can totally probably nuke all of our cities, but we're going to nuke all of yours back and we'll just end the world. So if you want to start with us, we'll just make sure that nobody walks out of here alive. And hopefully that's enough of a threat to not actually escalate things. Right. It's one of those things that we've seen since the dawn of warfare. Like I think when Hiram Maxim invented the belt fed machine gun, he was like, this will end all war because this weapon is so terrible and horrible and will kill so many people if you try to run at it that nobody will want to fight war anymore. I think that was Alfred Nobel also when he created dynamite, he was like, This will end war forever. Mm hmm. And so that was the same theory with mutually assured destruction. I can't imagine anybody who would really want to risk destroying everybody in the world because they were mad about something. That's crazy. But people going to peace. Nobody thinks like that, right? No, Nobody thinks like that. Nobody is that much of a madman. But. But. But even though, of course, no one would ever actually think like that. You have to wonder. There's the little thought in the back of your head. What if someone actually does? Mm hmm. So, yeah, this is the this is the background against which all of this is happening. Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, he's sitting in his military silo, monitoring things on his control panel.

[00:25:19] Lots of dials, blinking lights, dingy metal, beige fixtures. I'm assuming everything is beige, just like HBO, Chernobyl, right? Yeah. Yeah. Lots and lots of socialist architecture. Socialist architecture. Socialist Nukeproof architecture. Yeah. Maybe he's bored, Maybe he's annoyed. Maybe he's on edge because tensions are high on the geopolitical scale and then alert incoming. But he hesitates. What's going through his head? What would you do, Ben, in that moment? Let's talk for a second about what would happen if he pushes the button. Yeah. So what he is getting here is he is early warning detection. So he is at the base. That would be the first one. One of the first ones to pick up a an ICBM launch from Europe or the United States. And so he's got two options in this moment. One is you do nothing. Maybe this is a false alarm. Some of this equipment's old. There could be an error. It could be a big flock of birds that's reading weird on the radar. Could be something that isn't accounted for it. Okay. If it's a nuke and you don't push that button right now, that mutually assured destruction is out the window because Moscow gets flattened and you haven't retaliated. And if there's more missiles coming, World War Three happens and we have a unilateral World War three, and now your entire country is dust and you've lost and everybody's dead. And it was your fault for hesitating at the button. Right. And if you don't hesitate at the button, then you've just ended all life on earth as you know it. And it's nuclear winter and it's going to be, you know, a Cormac McCarthy novel here for the foreseeable future. Everybody's going to be mad maxing around Australia, and it's going to be this nightmare reality that nobody's happy with in that moment, with this decision tree with major consequences going through his head.

[00:27:32] What does Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov do? Does he hit the button? He decides this has got to be an error. Something about it, like his hunch tells him it's maybe one of those things that you mentioned, but maybe it's like a weird flock of birds. Maybe it's a glitch. Whatever his intuition is telling him. Now, this is this is a false positive. Now he wants to ignore it. Does he trust his superiors to be rational about this? I mean, remember the way they reacted to that Korean Airlines flight? What he is sitting on isn't a nuclear launch. It is the red line to the Kremlin, right? Yeah. He is sitting on a button that is like all points bulletin. Nuclear missile launch detected. Like war has begun. Like, let's get everything going. Like, he's not going to launch one missile by pushing this button. He is going to set the entirety of the Soviet Union to DEFCON one and launch every missile and fire off every alert and everything. But like, he's got a duty to report this, like this popped up. There's a missile launch detected. I got to tell my boss, but do I trust that my boss isn't going to completely overreact and nuke Earth? But on the other hand, if I don't tell my boss, even if this is a false alarm, is he going to be really mad at me for not telling him about it? Keeping this to myself. And it was like. Is that like dereliction of duty? Am I going to end up in a gulag like beating rocks with a pickax for the rest of my life in Siberia? Exactly. This is what's going through his head. This is what's at stake for him personally and for the world.

[00:29:18] And, you know, where's his where's his hunch coming from? Well, he knows that the equipment, the thing that he's seeing, it's only registering five missiles. That seems on the low side, but it's more than one. Okay, okay. It's more than one. It's more than zero. You know, the top five population centers in Russia are a lot of people. True. True. The launch system was new. The bugs weren't all worked out. I don't know if it's fair to say beta testing, but you know how it is every time you update software on your iPhone and it's like something weird happens and a message like this is supposed to go through 30 layers of verification. And Pedro, it seemed kind of quick for that much double checking. And also, you would expect, generally speaking, if something is true, there are multiple ways that you can find out that it's true. You would expect ground radar to pick up evidence to corroborate what Pedro was seeing on his equipment, but he wasn't getting any of that even after waiting a bit. So he decides to ride this one out. Now he just has to wait. Are the nukes real? Only one way to find out. Yeah, because it doesn't. It's not instant. It's not like a torpedo in the movies. You got to wait. And it's like somewhere in, like, 5 to 15 minute range where you just got to sit there with your decision and stew and panic. Second guess yourself. Yeah. In my head, he goes outside to smoke a cigaret. I don't know if that was feasible. I just I'm like, I'm, I'm sure he was chain smoking them wherever he was inside or out. Smoking if you got him. It's the end of the world in 1983.

[00:31:02] So the control panel is beeping and blinking. Turns out the satellites had just misinterpreted this freak occurrence of sunlight hitting some high altitude clouds in a particular way, somewhere above North Dakota as a butterfly flapping its wings in North Dakota because of the tsunami in Moscow. Yeah. Chaos theory meets mutually assured destruction. Oh, dear, Oh, dear. That's true. Chaos. That's just chaos. It's no longer chaos theory. That's just chaos. And they later corrected all of this by cross-referencing a satellite in a different orbit. And there was no World War three. Stanislav Petrov, having zero confidence in his superiors, paid off for him. Yeah, And that's how you and I then we're sitting here talking about this as opposed to not existing. Yeah, and one of my favorite bits of this is that, like, we didn't even know this story until way after it happened in the West, at least. But it's interesting because around the late nineties, early 2000s, the US was actually sending a lot of sometimes military, but sometimes civilian contractors and engineers over to Russia, the Russian Federation, because right after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the years following that, a lot of their missile detection systems were a little outdated because some of their technology was some of their radar systems and things were picking up sunlight in North Dakota and assuming it was Merv warheads descending on the Soviet Union. And so we actually, like the U.S. and Europe, sent technicians and engineers over there to update their systems so that, you know, if we were going to blow each other up, like, we might as well do it for a good reason. We shouldn't do it, but for an accident. But when a lot of this stuff was just becoming declassified, this story came out of like we were actually like one button press away from having a serious DEFCON two DEFCON one situation.

[00:33:02] But I wrote about it in oh four, and then I always kind of feel like I came out in front of this story. I kind of feel like I scooped it a little bit because a lot of the stuff that came out that's been written about this came out after my Bat Out of the Week article on it, which I feel very proud about in a weird way. What happened to Lieutenant Colonel Petrov? He actually was reprimanded for not filling out the correct paperwork like it sounds like some sort of, like, weird military satire or a cliche. But, yeah, he did not. He didn't fill out the paperwork. He got yelled at for not filling out the correct paperwork. He did not entertain. Tell anybody. Right. He didn't. Yeah. He didn't say anything to anybody about it. He was just like, Oh, yeah, let's just pretend it didn't happen. Yeah, he did not entered into the war diary. He was subjected to intense derogation by his superiors. I bet that was not fun. No, I. Like the Soviets were kind of famous for their intense interrogations. Yes. Now, to be fair, his quote, correct actions were, in fact, duly noted. But he was also reprimanded and not given any public recognition, even though he had basically prevented World War three. I mean, you know, gulag in Siberia on one hand, you know, international acclaim. On the other, like I think writing the center is kind of holding the course probably fine in the grand scheme of things here. But he did receive some recognition eventually. Yeah. And once the story came out, once everything started to kind of be declassified, the story came out and and Petro was it was an interesting guy who was a career army guy.

[00:34:39] So he had kind of come up flying fighter aircraft during World War Two, which is pretty awesome and. And yeah, and then he had this whole long career with the early warning detection systems and and this one moment, this one decision he made which was to do nothing really, is the thing that he's the most recognized for. And now there's a Stanislav Petrov day on September 26 every year to kind of commemorate him. He was honored by the United Nations, and everybody kind of knows the story. They did a documentary on him called The Man Who Saved the World, which is very good. You should watch it. But yeah, he did eventually get kind of the credit that was due him. And he, of course, like many badasses, was very humble about it. Like, oh, yeah, just, you know, anybody would have done the same thing in my situation. No big deal. Petrov passed away in 2017, I believe, but he's one of these great, like, truly unsung heroes. That unsung for 20 something years after the events that made him famous. Now that we know him for today. Just imagine trying to sit there and listen and watch those beeps and watch that sunlight trek across North Dakota wondering whether it's headed for St Petersburg, you know? Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of a rarity for us, Pat. We have two bad asses and zero dead bodies at the end of their. At the end of the episode. Indeed. Hmm. Yeah. Go figure. Well, we'll make up for it next week. Thank you, guys, as always, for listening. And we hope to see you next week with another badass.

Pat: Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.