Stanislav Petrov Concepts

Risk: A User's Guide

by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico · 4 Oct 2021 · 489pp · 106,008 words

-ins of the 1960s from a young age, just as Chinese citizens know the story of Chairman Mao and the Long March. But the name Stanislav Petrov is at most a historical curiosity, despite his world-changing act of disobedience. Arguably, September 26, 1983, witnessed the single most important act of insubordination

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bombers, tens of thousands of targets struck, and many millions dead. Petrov was an essential human link in an otherwise automated decision chain. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’s bravery wasn’t publicly known until after the Soviet Union’s collapse. (Nikolai Ignatiev / Alamy Stock Photo) It was during his Monday watch, amid

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Science,” Skeptical Inquirer 14, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 264, https://skepticalinquirer.org/1990/04/why-we-need-to-understand-science/. September 26, 1983: Sewell Chan, “Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77,” The New York Times, September 18, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world

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/europe/stanislav-petrov-nuclear-war-dead.html. no direct authority to initiate: David Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut,’ ” The Washington Post Foreign Service, February

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10, 1999, p. A19, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/soviet10.htm; Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” single phone call of warning: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” paused in shock: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” They understood well: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov”; Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’ ” Still, he knew the time: Chan

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, “Stanislav Petrov.” Petrov later explained: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov”; Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’ ” strange for the

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Americans to launch: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov”; Hoffman, “ ‘I Had

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a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’ ” “50-50” estimate of probability: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” early warning satellite constellation: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov”; Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny

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Feeling in My Gut.’ ” he received a reprimand: Chan, “Stanislav Petrov.” faulted his improper note taking: Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’ ” O&I in

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War

by Paul Scharre · 23 Apr 2018 · 590pp · 152,595 words

after midnight on September 26, the system issued a grave report: the United States had launched a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty that night in bunker Serpukhov-15 outside Moscow, and it was his responsibility to report the missile launch up the chain of

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big picture. Some decisions in war are straightforward. Sometimes the enemy is easily identified and the shot is clear. Some decisions, however, like the one Stanislav Petrov faced, require understanding the broader context. Some situations, like the one my sniper team encountered, require moral judgment. Sometimes doing the right thing entails breaking

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human “in the loop,” but the human operators didn’t question the machine when they should have. They didn’t exercise the kind of judgment Stanislav Petrov did when he questioned the signals his system was giving him regarding a false launch of U.S. nuclear missiles. The Patriot operators trusted the

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used, intentionally or accidentally, since 1945. On closer inspection, however, the safety track record of nuclear weapons is less than inspiring. In addition to the Stanislav Petrov incident in 1983, there have been multiple nuclear near-miss incidents that could have had catastrophic consequences. Some of these could have resulted in an

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. Both involve high-speed adversarial interactions in complex, uncontrolled environments. Could something analogous to a flash crash occur in war—a flash war? Certainly, if Stanislav Petrov’s fateful decision had been automated, the consequences could have been disastrous: nuclear war. Nuclear command and control is a niche application, though. One could

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of cognitive tasks. AGI could be applied to solving humanity’s toughest problems, including those that involve nuance, ambiguity, and uncertainty. An AGI could, like Stanislav Petrov, step back to consider the broader context and apply judgment. What it would take to build such a machine is a matter of pure speculation

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decision-making. REMOVING THE HUMAN FAIL-SAFE In a fast-paced environment, autonomous weapons would remove a vital safety in preventing unwanted escalation: human judgment. Stanislav Petrov’s fateful decision in bunker Serpukhov-15 represents an extreme case of the benefits of human judgment, but there are many more examples from crisis

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the submarine. He was Captain Savitsky’s superior and his approval was also required. Reportedly, only Arkhipov was opposed to launching the torpedo. As with Stanislav Petrov, once again the judgment of a single Soviet officer may have again prevented the outbreak of nuclear war. DETERRENCE AND THE DEAD HAND Sometimes, there

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leaders’ decision-making in a crisis. If there were warnings of an incoming U.S. surprise attack, as was the case in 1983 in the Stanislav Petrov incident and again in 1995 when Russian military leaders brought the nuclear suitcase to Boris Yeltsin in response to a Norwegian scientific rocket launch, there

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War tragedy still seems surreal,” CNN.com, August 31, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/kal-fight-007-anniversary/index.html. 1 Stanislav Petrov: David Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut,’ ” Washington Post, February 10, 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b

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.htm. 1 red backlit screen: Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World,” BBC.com, September 26, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831. 2 five altogether: Ibid

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. 2 Petrov had a funny feeling: Hoffman, “I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’” 2 Petrov put the odds: Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World.” 5 Sixteen nations already have armed drones: The United States, United Kingdom, Israel, China, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink

by Taylor Downing · 23 Apr 2018 · 400pp · 121,708 words

leadership time in which to respond appropriately; and to get to a shelter.4 At 7 p.m. on Monday, 26 September 1983, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov arrived at the compound’s command centre having been asked at the last minute to take over a shift as another officer had reported in

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which Petrov proudly pointed out to visitors. It was inscribed with a few words from Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations: ‘To Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World’. By the autumn of 1983, the two superpowers possessed about 18,400 nuclear warheads. They were on the tips

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sun on clouds in the Midwest of the United States as a sign that missiles had been launched. On that occasion the cool head of Stanislav Petrov had defused the situation, but there was no guarantee that the officer on duty would respond in the same way to another early warning. The

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a new US alert as clear evidence of the prelude to a nuclear attack and responded according to their Launch Under Attack doctrine. So, like Stanislav Petrov six weeks before, the world was lucky that Perroots stuck to his ‘gut instinct’. As a later report confirmed, ‘it was his recommendation, made in

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Safety. 3 See Randall Maydew and Julie Bush, America’s Lost H-Bomb. 4 Hoffman, The Dead Hand, pp.7–9. 5 FLASHBACK: Interview with Stanislav Petrov; the quotations that follow are from this interview. 12 Truck Bomb 1 Reagan, An American Life, p.407ff. 2 Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, p

Gorbachev: His Life and Times

by William Taubman

speeding toward Moscow. The duty officer had seven minutes to alert Andropov, who was on a dialysis machine in a suburban sanatorium. Fortunately, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov concluded that the alarm was false. Meanwhile, however, the Americans and British were preparing to conduct the “Able Archer 83” war game, in which NATO

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

by David Hoffman · 1 Jan 2009 · 719pp · 209,224 words

Union and the outside world did not. II. Night Watch for Nuclear War The shift change began at 7 P.M. on September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel, arrived at Serpukhov-15, south of Moscow, a top-secret missile attack early-warning station, which received signals from satellites. Petrov changed

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the loss of just one could be catastrophic.2 Another step would be to take the remaining strategic nuclear weapons off launch-ready alert. When Stanislav Petrov faced the false alarm in 1983, launch decisions had to be made in just minutes. Today, Russia is no longer the ideological or military threat

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Yevstigneev, interview, Feb. 10, 2005. Yevstigneev's comment repeated the claim made in an article published May 23, 2001, in the Russian newspaper Nezavisamaya Gazeta. Stanislav Petrov, the general in charge of chemical weapons, was a coauthor. The piece claimed the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was the result of "subversive activity" against the

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Soviet Union. Stanislav Petrov et al., "Biologicheskaya Diversia Na Urale" [Biological Sabotage in the Urals], NG, May 23, 1001. 12 The closed military facilities are: the Scientific-Research Institute

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian · 5 Oct 2020 · 625pp · 167,349 words

the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. —LEARNED HAND It was September 26, 1983, just after midnight, and Soviet duty officer Stanislav Petrov was in a bunker outside of Moscow, monitoring the Oko early-warning satellite system. Suddenly the screen lit up and sirens began howling. There was

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the writing of this book whose voices I would have loved to include, and whose ideas are nevertheless present: Derek Parfit, Kenneth Arrow, Hubert Dreyfus, Stanislav Petrov, and Ursula K. Le Guin. I want to express a particular gratitude to the University of California, Berkeley. To CITRIS, where I was honored to

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Brissot de Warville.” 59. Bentham, “Preface.” CHAPTER 9. UNCERTAINTY 1. Russell, “Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind.” 2. “Another Day the World Almost Ended.” 3. Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov.” 4. Aksenov. 5. Hoffman, “‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut.’ ” 6. Nguyen, Yosinski, and Clune, “Deep Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled.” For a

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. Akrour, Riad, Marc Schoenauer, Michèle Sebag, and Jean-Christophe Souplet. “Programming by Feedback.” In International Conference on Machine Learning, 1503–11. JMLR, 2014. Aksenov, Pavel. “Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World.” BBC News, September 25, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831. Al-Shawaf, Laith, Daniel

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Lauren Kirchner. “Machine Bias.” ProPublica, May 23, 2016. “Another Day the World Almost Ended.” RT, May 19, 2010. https://www.rt.com/usa/nuclear-war-stanislav-petrov/. Anthony, Thomas, Zheng Tian, and David Barber. “Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 5360

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy · 12 May 2014

South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, including a sitting member of the US Congress. They then awaited American retaliation. Later that month, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Command near Moscow saw a blip on his radar screen indicating a missile headed toward the USSR. Then he

Nuclear War: A Scenario

by Annie Jacobsen · 25 Mar 2024 · 444pp · 105,807 words

the Serpukhov-15 facility for more than fifty years. As in America, there have been terrifying false alarms. Once, in 1983, a lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was the commander in charge when satellite data indicated there were five American ICBMs on their way to strike Moscow with nuclear weapons. For reasons

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-warning signal as a “false alarm,” he said, thereby not sending a report up the chain of command. For his well-placed skepticism, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov famously became known as “the man who saved the world from nuclear war.” But in this moment of intense nuclear crisis in this scenario—with

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. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Petrov: David Hoffman, “ ‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut,’ ” Washington Post Foreign Service, February 10, 1999; “Person: Stanislav Petrov,” Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, National Park Service, 2007. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “look like one hundred:” Interview with Ted Postol. I also

Know Thyself

by Stephen M Fleming · 27 Apr 2021

might properly enough be called internal sense. —JOHN LOCKE, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II Is something there, or not? This was the decision facing Stanislav Petrov one early morning in September 1983. Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces and in charge of monitoring early warning satellites

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here I am generally concerned with awareness of mental states. Chapter 1: How to Be Uncertain 1. Jonathan Steele, “Stanislav Petrov Obituary,” The Guardian, October 11, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/11/stanislav-petrov-obituary. 2. Green and Swets (1966). 3. The seeds of Bayes’s rule were first identified by the

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

would go nuclear. And in September 1983, the only thing preventing a Russian nuclear launch may have been the canny judgment of Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov, who correctly inferred that a report of a U.S. ICBM attack was a false alarm, avoiding an escalation that would have triggered Soviet nuclear

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happen. Decisions are left in the hands of vulnerable human beings facing incalculable pressure. Not all of them will have the presence of mind of Stanislav Petrov. “If you put tactical nuclear weapons on the border, you’re not saying that I’m going to order them to be used. That may

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once in the next 20 years. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT John F. Kennedy: Ord, The Precipice, 26. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Stanislav Petrov: Dylan Matthews, “40 Years Ago Today, One Man Saved Us from World-Ending Nuclear War,” Vox, September 26, 2018, vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796

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/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “bomb is shit”: Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 938. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT