As the story is told in part five of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, Netflix’s epic nine-part history of the Cold War and its weapons, the world was on edge in September 1983. The month began with the Soviet military shooting down a Korean Air passenger flight that had wandered off its course. It concluded a whisker away from an accidental nuclear war that would have obliterated the life we knew.
The conventional wisdom – and the story told in Turning Point – is that the world is extremely fortunate that Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Army, was the duty officer at the command centre for the USSR’s Oko nuclear early-warning system on the night of September 26. Petrov, whose background was in engineering rather than a military careerist, decided that when the monitoring system in his care reported that five American nuclear missiles were on their way, it was likely malfunctioning. He did not, as a real military man would, follow orders and report the alarm to his superiors, who might have launched a retaliatory strike, such was their paranoia.
As I watched, I wondered what I would have been doing. Not much, probably: it was a Monday night. The record shows that Shona Laing and the Topp Twins played the Wellington Peace Festival two days earlier, but I can’t recall feeling that civilisation was edging towards the precipice that month. I was deputy editor of a rock’n’roll magazine and I was living the life. My big news was that I’d interviewed Malcolm McLaren. On the day the world nearly ended, Dave and the Dynamos’ Life Begins at Forty was beginning its third and final week at the top of the national singles chart.
Would things have been different today? The proximity of world events to our personal lives has been radically changed by the internet; they are immediate in a way they weren’t before.
I can’t even open X (formerly Twitter) without being reminded that two famous rappers are having an impenetrable beef. Even so, we can’t be mindful every minute we live that a child in Gaza is likely being blown apart or crushed by masonry and we are impotent to stop it. We’d never laugh again.
Watching Turning Point disinter the madness that brought us to the nuclear brink over decades – periodically reminding us the story isn’t over yet – I find it hard not to think of the slow-rolling catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change.
Has there been a month in the past year in which massed climate scientists have not been publicly freaking out? And still we elect leaders who do things that make it worse, because nothing really incentivises today’s attention to tomorrow’s bad news.
Turning Point reports that two months after the 1983 false alarm, US president Ronald Reagan watched The Day After, a TV movie about nuclear war that moved him so deeply he decided he could not be responsible for such horrors.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, a deadly heatwave in India galvanises that country’s government on the threat of climate change, but, at least at first, the global system forges on.
Here in the real world, the middle class has its own special signal: last year’s deadly heatwave in Europe has trebled the global price of olive oil, perhaps permanently. But on we forge, as the government promises to re-authorise and actively underwrite exploration for more fossil fuels to burn.
It’s not that we don’t have alternatives, or even that those alternatives aren’t cheaper. It’s that sometimes, change itself is so hard that we devote the gift of human imagination to the belief we can avoid it.
