Monday, June 26, 2017

Here's a story that will bring a smile to anyone who teaches ethics, philosophy, and the humanities:

WHOA!   That's a "BRAVO" for edcaation....  HERE IS THE KEY:   He says he was the only officer in his team who had received a civilian education.

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Thirty years ago, on 26 September 1983, the world was saved from potential nuclear disaster.
In the early hours of the morning, the Soviet Union's early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Computer readouts suggested several missiles had been launched. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.
But duty officer Stanislav Petrov - whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches - decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.
This was a breach of his instructions, a dereliction of duty. The safe thing to do would have been to pass the responsibility on, to refer up.
But his decision may have saved the world.
There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time

Stanislav Petrov
"I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it," he told the BBC's Russian Service 30 years after that overnight shift.

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He says he was the only officer in his team who had received a civilian education. "My colleagues were all professional soldiers, they were taught to give and obey orders," he told us.
So, he believes, if somebody else had been on shift, the alarm would have been raised.

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You can read the full story here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831#


I learned about this event from a National History Day project.  The summary of the project is HERE

Special thanks to students Chen and Yu


Stanislav Petrov: An Unlikely Hero of the Cold War
3rd Place Senior Group Website
Yi Chen (Luke) Chang & Danny Yu
SMIC Private School
Shanghai, China
Process Paper and Annotated Bibliography

https://nhd.org/sites/default/files/ChenYuProcess.pdf#overlay-context=winners

Look at this ANNOTATED bibliography.
Yi Chen (Luke) Chang, Danny Yu
STANISLAV PETROV: THE UNSUNG HERO
Primary Sources
"A.I. Mikoyan, Memorandum of Conversation with Robert Kennedy," November 30, 1962, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AVP RF; copy obtained by NHK, provided to CWIHP, and on file at National Security Archive; translated by David Wolff, CWIHP. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111210 This is a document about the conversation between American and Soviet officials discussing the future of Soviet-American relations. It was a dinner meeting, with the majority of the content involving a private conversation between A.I. Mikoyan (First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union) and President R. Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just ended a month ago, but the tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still a major concern. The trust between President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev was under danger due to the Cuban Missile Crisis and they were trying to regain trust and maintain peace. The guests at the dinner include “R. Kennedy, Deputy Secretary of State [George] Ball, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors [Walter] Heller, the chairman of the Board of Directors of the "New York Times" [Orville] Dryfoos, and the Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin.” The discussions and conclusions of the meeting were meant for the general public of the U.S. and of the Soviet Union. The purpose of this meeting was 1) to discuss the future of Soviet-American relations and 2) to question each other’s actions and plans. The meeting was recounted by Mikoyan, possibly containing slight preference towards the Soviet Union on the conversation. Everyone who spoke at the meeting held high governmental positions. This document extends our thesis and helps us to explain the Soviet-American relationship leading up to the incident. 


REMARKABLE
This is how to annotate a reference!   this is how to write a biibliography with annotations to guide the reader

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