Ending the fool's game; saving civilization.

"A fool's game" is how retired General George Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, refers to nuclear weapons. He says that these weapons offer no security and their complete elimination is "the only defensible goal."

A fool's game, indeed--and the United States is the biggest fool for allowing the power elite to maintain a stockpile of over thirty thousand nuclear weapons more than a decade after the end of the Cold War.

The ultimate absurdity is that thousands of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads remain on hair-trigger alert and could be launched on a few minutes' notice, potentially destroying both countries in less than an hour. As Bruce Blair, head of the Center for Defense Information (CDI) and a former Minuteman Missile Launch officer states, "Both sides are cocked on hair-triggers ... and both sides can retarget a missile in seconds--just a few strokes on a keyboard."

The result is that the United States continues to be under the daily threat of nuclear incineration whether initiated by an accidental missile launch, miscalculation, or design. Regarding miscalculation, the United States and Soviet Union had come frighteningly close to nuclear war over the years, with mere luck playing a major role in averting disaster.

Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, acknowledges that during the Cuban missile crisis "we came within a hairbreadth of nuclear war without realizing it." He said, "It's no credit to us that we missed nuclear war--at least we had to be lucky as well as wise."

It can only be guessed how many other close calls there have been over the years but here are a few documented examples:

1979: A CNN Cold War program reported that a technician at the North American Air Defense Command mistakenly placed a training tape into the main systems at NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. The tape caused NORAD's early-warning system computer to respond that the United States was undergoing a massive Soviet missile attack. NORAD officials were alerted but within minutes the error was discovered, ending the threat of launching U.S. missiles in retaliation. This incident was one of rive missile warning system failures that occurred over an eight-month period.

1980: In the August 14, 1983, issue of Parade, Jack Anderson reports that on November 19, 1980, two Air Force missile officers were conducting a drill of a simulated missile launch of their Titan missile at McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita, Kansas. When Captain Henry Winsett and First Lieutenant David Mosley turned the keys for the simulated launch, something went wrong. They received a message of "Launch Sequence Go" which means the real missile launch sequence is underway. Fortunately, Winsett had the good sense to shut the missile down before it could be launched. Mosley said it couldn't be determined whether the missile's guidance system would have steered the missile to a target in Russia, which would assuredly have resulted in Soviet retaliation. But, he said, it would have gone somewhere "north." This close call still gives him tremors.

1984: As reported on the CNN Cold War program, in August 1984 a low-ranking officer at Soviet Pacific fleet headquarters in Vladivostok broadcast a war alert to Soviet forces at sea. For thirty minutes, until it was determined that the alert was false, Soviet ship commanders sent back urgent inquiries about the alert as they prepared for combat. In the meantime, U.S. and Japanese forces also went to a higher alert status.

1995: The Center for Defense Information (CDI) and several other reliable sources report that in 1995 the monitors of the Russian Strategic Rocker Force at the Olengrosk early-warning radar site registered the launch of a U.S.-Norwegian research missile probe of the upper atmosphere. To the Russians, the missile's trajectory looked like a U.S. Trident missile, which carries multiple nuclear warheads. This set off alarms at the Russian nuclear weapons command, which notified President Boris Yeltsin, who reportedly activated his "nuclear briefcase." For a few minutes perhaps the fate of the United States--and Western civilization--hung on Yeltsin's judgment.

All of these incidents constituted alarmingly close calls. Blair believes that the closest the Americans and Soviets ever came to accidental nuclear war, however, was the 1983 incident involving Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. His story has been reported by the BBC, on NBC Dateline and NOVA, and in the London Daily Mail and other sources and is perhaps the most dramatic of all the reported close calls, other than the Cuban Missile Crisis. This story could rightly be called "A Forgotten Hero of Our Time."

On September 26, 1983, Petrov was in charge of two hundred men, mostly officers, operating the Russian early-warning bunker just south of Moscow. Petrov's job that fateful night was to lead a staff monitoring incoming signals from satellites. He reported directly to the Russian early-warning system headquarters which reported directly to the Soviet leader on the possibility of launching a retaliatory attack.

It's important to note that this was a period of very high tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. President Ronald Reagan was continually referring to the Soviets as "the evil empire." The Soviet military had shot down a Korean passenger jet just three weeks prior to this incident and the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization were organizing a military exercise that centered on using tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Some Soviet leaders were worried the West was planning a nuclear attack.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Petrov recalled that night, when computer screens were showing an attack launched by the United States. He said, "I felt as if I'd been punched in my nervous system. There was a huge map of the States with a U.S. base lit up, showing that the missiles had been launched."

For several minutes Petrov held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other as alarms blared, red lights blinked, and computers reported that U.S. missiles were on their way. In the midst of this horrific chaos and terror--the prospect of the end of civilization itself--Petrov made a historic decision not to alert higher authorities, somehow believing that, contrary to what all the sophisticated equipment was reporting, the alarm was an error.

"I didn't want to make a mistake," Petrov said. "I made a decision and that was it." As the Daily Mail states, "Had Petrov cracked and triggered a response, Soviet missiles would have rained down on U.S. cities. In turn, that would have brought a devastating response from the Pentagon."

As agonizing minutes passed, Petrov's decision proved correct. A computer error had falsely signaled the U.S. attack. In the Daily Mail interview, Petrov said, "After it was over, I drank half a liter of vodka as if it were only a glass and slept for 28 hours." He commented, "In principle, a nuclear war could have broken out. The whole world could have been destroyed."

In increasingly superficial modern societies that praise celebrities and all manner of fools as role models, many legitimate heroes go unnoticed and without reward. In the case or Petrov, he was dismissed from the army on a pension that in succeeding years would prove nearly worthless. Petrov's superiors were reprimanded for the computer error and all in the group were subjected to the same treatment.

The Daily Mirror report round Petrov's health destroyed by the enormous stress of the incident. His wife died of cancer and he lives alone in a second-floor flat in a small town about thirty miles from Moscow. "Once I would have liked to have been given some credit for what I did," said Petrov. "But it is too long ago and today everything is emotionally burned out inside me. I still have a bitter feeling inside my soul as I remember the way I was treated."

In a November 12, 2000, interview with Petrov, Dateline reporter Dennis Murphy said, "I know you don't regard yourself as a hero, Colonel, but, belatedly, on behalf of the people in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, thank you for being on duty that night."

The twentieth anniversary of this incident revealed, once again, how little has changed with the thousands of nuclear warheads still on hair-trigger alert. The utter madness of this situation was demonstrated in a recent report by the BBC that some scientists and military people are worried that a small asteroid passing close to the Earth could accidentally trigger a nuclear war if mistaken for a missile strike.

This dark scenario is exacerbated by President George W. Bush's nuclear weapons policy. Most ominous is National Security Presidential Directive 17, signed by Bush. This document declares that the United States reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force--including nuclear weapons--to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its forces abroad, friends, and allies. Military analyst William Arkin writes that the Bush administration's war planning "moves nuclear weapons out of their long-established special category and lumps them in with all the other military options."

The Bush team is also determined to build a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons designed to attack hardened underground bunkers. The United States has, for the first time in fourteen years, resumed production of plutonium parts for nuclear bombs. The Energy Department announced that plans are underway for a factory that could produce parts of hundreds of nuclear weapons a year. Congress gave the Bush team funding for this production--and just about everything it requested in the massive 2004 military budget of $401 billion. The CDI reports that U.S. military spending is equal to the military spending of the next twenty countries combined.

Blair reports that both the United States and Russia remain preoccupied with preparing to fight a large-scale nuclear war with each other. U.S. spy planes monitor the Russian coast and U.S. submarines still trail Russian submarines as soon as they leave port.

As the nuclear crisis escalates with scant reporting by the media, the words of General Douglas McArthur in a speech to the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines on July 5, 1961, seem appropriate:

   But this very triumph of scientific annihilation--this
   very success of invention--has
   destroyed the possibility of war's being a
   medium for the practical settlement of international
   differences.... Global war has
   become a Frankenstein to destroy both
   sides.... If you lose you are annihilated. If
   you win, you stand only to lose. No longer
   does it possess even the chance of the winner
   of a duel. It contains now only the germs
   of double suicide.

The nuclear policymakers have known the "double-suicide" consequences of nuclear weapons for decades. In the 1960s, McGeorge Bundy, assistant to President John E Kennedy, said, "In the real world even one hydrogen bomb on one city would be a catastrophe; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history. A hundred, or even less, would be the end of civilization."

Today, in this fourth year of the new millennium, thirty thousand nuclear weapons remain stockpiled, while the nuclear club has expanded to include India, Israel, Pakistan, and possibly North Korea. And a recent International Atomic Energy Commission report states that up to forty other countries may be capable of building nuclear weapons.

Terrorism is a burning problem that the United States must counter. But the greatest terrorism by far is that each day the people of the world continue to be under the threat of nuclear incineration whether by an accidental missile launch, a computer error, or design.

An intelligent visitor from another world might conclude that Euripides was correct in saying, "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." Certainly the present nuclear condition is a madness created by those in power. It must be ended before it is too late, as Kennedy stated in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, 1961:

   Every man, woman and child lives under a
   nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the
   slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at
   any moment by accident or miscalculation
   or madness. The weapons of war must be
   abolished before they abolish us.

We cannot count on a Petrov to always be on duty, or on the luck that has played a big role in averting nuclear war to this date. We can only count on ourselves to have the intelligence and the respect for humanity and life on this planet to mobilize with an unyielding determination to apply a constant pressure on world governments--particularly the United States as the leading culprit in the new escalation--until these weapons are abolished "before they abolish us."

The starting point is for all nuclear warheads to be removed from hair-trigger alert, placed in storage, and constantly inspected by representatives of the United States, Russia, and the United Nations. This would eliminate the possibility of a nuclear exchange starting by an accidental missile launch or computer error.

Beyond this first step, the goal that can never be compromised is the total elimination of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. Only then will humanity be liberated from the "fool's game" and the nuclear nightmare that began with the mushroom cloud over the obliterated city of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

Douglas Mattern is president of the Association of World Citizens, a San Francisco-based international peace organization with branches in over thirty countries and nongovernmental organization status with the United Nations, including consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council.