May 9, 2023 • 37 mins
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
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Stanislav sits in front of the control panel, staring at
a bunch of blinking lights and dials, daydreaming about the
bowl of borsh he's going to eat later. It's another
day in paradise. Not maybe it's time for a smoke break,
he thinks. Then, oh shit, that's not his microwave popcorn
(00:28):
going off. That's the USSR's Early Warning Ballistic Missile detection
system and those beeps mean incoming nukes. But is this
really World War three or some kind of technical malfunction.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov stares at the big red launch
(00:49):
button on his control panel. He has three minutes to decide.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I am here as always
with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how you
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Doing okay?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
How are you Ben doing okay? We have kind of
a fun set of stories today. Usually on this show
we will 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
(01:32):
do the thing they were supposed to do and we're
badass because of it. And this first one that we're
going to talk about is one that 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,
(01:53):
I've been waiting for it for a year.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It sounds nice, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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 cruises, and you know the
kind of world quarantine began. And then like a week later,
a cruise ship did something badass and I was like,
(02:17):
I got to write about this.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So what is this cruise ship and what did it
do that was so badass?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
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.
(02:45):
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, you
pay them twenty grand and they drive you around Antarctica
to look at penguins and all that stuff. It's a
(03:07):
cruise ship carries about one hundred and forty passengers. But
on this particular day that we're going to talk about,
there's only thirty two 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 into to get some service done
on it. It is one o'clock in the morning on Monday,
(03:31):
March thirtieth, twenty twenty, and these thirty two people are
doing some open water engine maintenance en route from Buenos
Aires to Dutch Curisou. They're thirteen miles off the coast
of La Tortuga, not the one in Haiti and not
the one from the Michael Bolton song. And they're hailed
by another ships, the middle of the night, it's dark.
(03:53):
These guys are sailing, probably just by instrument, and they
get a call from the Venezuelan warship Niguaza. 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 badass, but it's probably
(04:16):
not that much fun because it is Venezuela and this
is the Venezuelan Navy. And yeah, any kind of detainment
sounds like a kind of a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Right 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 in Nicholas
Maduro who is the president. He was Hugo chav as
his vice president, and when he won the election in
twenty eighteen, he did so because he moved the election
date up six months and then he banned all of
(04:47):
the other political parties from voting, and he rules by
decree in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I think the bad guy in season two of The
Jack Ryan Show on Amazon Prime is based on him.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Could be could very well be.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, yeah, that happens not to have happened in our
actual timeline. So anyway, the guy that he ran against
was recognized by sixty like six zero other countries as
the president of Venezuela, but that didn't really have any
practical effect because Maduro was living in the presidential palace,
(05:34):
they had all the guns, and just a few weeks before,
the US government declared that he was a dictator and
a narco terrorist and they put a fifteen million dollar
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
(05:55):
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. So if you're 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
(06:18):
to not get involved.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, this isn't the highway patrol pulling you over on
nine to ninety five at six o'clock in the afternoon.
This is the official Venezuelan story about these thirty two
members on board the ship was that they were quote
mercenaries sent to attack Venezuelan bases. They must have been
pretty badass mercenaries, because thirty two guys taking over an
(06:40):
entire naval base seems kind of like something you'd see
in a Tom Clancy novel.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Maybe they'd recruited some penguins.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I'm gonna 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
Falkland Islands penguin. There are not that many of them.
They were extremely endangered in the early nineteen eighties and
this war began. The Falclon Islands War was in nineteen
(07:10):
eighty two between England and Argentina. The Argentinians put land
mines throughout big swaths of one of the Falcon Islands,
I think South Falkland Island, and it was actually like
the breeding grounds for these penguins. Oh no, those little
tiny Falcon Island penguins.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Horrible.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It's horrible, except that the Falkland Island penguin. Most land
mines require certain amount of weight, and the Falkland Island
penguin is not heavy enough to set off the land mine.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
And these things were extremely they were extremely close to
being extinct. There was only less than one hundred of
them I believe alive at the time that this minefield
was planted. And the penguins don't set off the land mines,
but the seals that eat them do the pun. But
the population of the Falkland Island penguin has kind of
(08:03):
exploded in the last couple of decades.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Shang, I see what you did.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
They're no longer in danger. Well that's a badass penguin
from South America. That was a weird transition. But let's
get back into some serious shit.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Here. We have thirty two unarmed crew members of this
cruise ship and they are sailing it into Dutch Currasou
in the Caribbean to like get a drink and sit
on a beach somewhere. And now Nicholas Maduro, narco terrorist
of Venezuela, dictator wanted for crimes all over the world.
(08:43):
He is saying that these thirty two ordinary sailors are
international superspy 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.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Or weeks, who knows how long.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, ransom them, Ransom them back to the Royal Canadian
Geological Society, which I imagine can't afford to them, but
probably Canada will. Somebody's gonna pay to bring these guys
home so they don't just rotten Venezuelan jail or.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Maybe Jack Ryan will rescue them.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Sure right, maybe Jack Ryan, maybe John Krasinski will parachute
in and single handedly rescue them. Okay, you don't want
to be arrested as a terrorist by Nicholas Maduro. So
the captain he radio is into home base with the situation,
Hey got 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 one
(09:37):
o'clock in the morning in the Caribbean. I don't know
what time that makes it. And 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.
What does respond is a seventy six millimeter artillery shell
fired from the Venezuelan warship Niguada, fires across his bow
just to really, they're not trying to hit him, but
(09:58):
they're shooting a warning shot at him to let it know. Hey,
pull over, pull the vehicle over to the shoulder, get
your licensed registration, prepare to be boarded. So the captain
radio's back again to headquarters and he says, look, you know,
international waters start at twelve miles off the coast of
(10:18):
the land, and we are thirteen thirteen and a half
miles off the coast of Venezuela. We are in international waters. Now.
I don't want to be considered mercenary or terrorist or whatever.
Don't love the shooting things. I 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 RCGS Resolute
(10:40):
is actually kind of a badass ship. It has already
been arrested twice.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
How do you arrest a cruise ship or do you
mean arrest the people on the cruise ship or what
like the RCGS Resolute. You have the right to remain.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Silent, honestly kind of. So the ship was arrested in
Ninevet in August of twenty nineteen. And there's a quote
from the guy, the arresting officer. He's none of it,
PD or whatever. A guy named Thomas Payton, he said. Quote.
What stood out was that it was an actual cruise
ship that needed to be arrested. This does not happen
(11:15):
very often. End quote. So the ship was placed under
arrest because the owners of the ship owed one hundred
thousand dollars 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 worked something out,
and the ship was was let free. The ship was
arrested again under similar circumstances in November of twenty nineteen.
(11:35):
She was in Buenos Aires, and same thing owed money
was arrested by the Argentinian police. Uh oh, 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 ass.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
No, that is not bad.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Don't add it's just bad, right. Badass of the Week
podcast does not endoorse Not paying people for things that
you said you were going to pay them for, especially
when they are nonprofits dedicated to saving penguins. I 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.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
I mean, I'm making certain assumptions here, but yeah, I
think it's correct.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The Magotta is heavily armed. It's the flagship of the
Venezuelan Navy. Means it's 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 seventy six millimeter main cannon. It's got a
couple of twelve point seven millimeters anti aircraft guns, and
(12:38):
it carries something called the millennium gun, which sounds like
some kind of super weapon from an anime about giant robots.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
But what is it.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Actually, it's an anti missile shotgun. If somebody shoots missiles
at it, it can kind of spray shotgun at it to
shoot down the missiles. Still millennium gun.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Millennium gun.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I hope that whoever was on, like the publicity department
for the millennium gun got promoted. Okay, So let's recap
RCSG Resolute. Thirty two 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 seventy six millimeters cannon.
(13:19):
There are forty four Venezuelan sailors on board the Niguada.
They are angry. They are yelling for the Resolute to
pull over. You are the Resolute pat What do you
do in this situation? Knowing what we know about the
Resolute being kind of fuck the police kind of operation?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Resolute, going back to what we talked about in the open,
it did nothing. It held its course completely straight.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It was resolute.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It was resolute, just kept going straight. The Iguada fires
a second warning shot, and then they fire a third
morning shot. A seventy six milimeters shell is big. It
will knock out warships, forget about cruise ships. But the
Resolute continues straight. Then Neiguada doesn't want to sink this ship.
They want to ransom it or investigate it, or interrogate
(14:15):
these people or whatever. So they try to ram it
with their warship. I believe this is 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. So they try to ram it to stop
it and slow it down. It bounces off. Okay, they
try to ram it again. That doesn't work. Then they
(14:35):
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 aks
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 changeing cores.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Body in motion, stays in motion exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
So the Niguada gets annoyed and it tries to ram
it up near the front.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
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 a definition something that like is good at
smashing things.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
It's very good at smashing things. It turns out, yes,
this is an Antarctic ice breaker, which it 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 nineteen ninety three in Finland. Its official icebreaker
rating from the Finnish Swedish Maritime Administration is a one
(15:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Bulbous prow.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yes, a one super bulbous prow. I don't know if
bulbus prow is some kind of not is like an
official nautical term, but it just sounds like something a
British person would use to refer to their junk.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
A one super bulbous prow Resolute going straight. It gets
hit by the Naguada, which is a little smaller, is
eighty meters long. It's not small. It's the flagship of
the Venezuelan Navy. But the resolute's about fifty percent bigure.
It's one hundred and twenty three meters And they hit
and this thing is designed to shear through things, and
it shears through the entire front end of the Niguada.
(16:21):
The ship starts to go down. All those forty four
marines who were shooting their aks 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 the Naguada,
the prize of the Venezuelan Navy, along with its famed
Millennium Gun, are sinking to the bottom of the Caribbean,
(16:41):
and the Resolute continues to not change course. The moral
of the story here is that when you're packing large
boor 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
(17:04):
on board and is designed for like smashing glaciers. The
captain of the Resolute radio to the guys in the water, like, hey,
do you want some help? Didn't get a message back
immediately and was like, yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just
gonna keep on going. I'm just gonna keep rolling on too, Currisou.
And they do. They roll straight on into Dutch Curisou.
(17:24):
The Naguada capsizes, sinks.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Leaving the guys floating.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
In all, forty four people are are are rescued, so
nobody dies in this, okay, in this situation here.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
I mean, I wasn't rooting for the Venezuelan soldiers, but
they probably were following orders and okay whatever, no one
got hurt.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
The story is less funny if it ends with forty
four dead bodies, you know, like yeah, yeah. The captain
of the Resolute, he is who I can never find
his name, 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
(18:02):
you do have to protect this guy's identity. He radio's
into the guys in the water, like, hey, do you
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 forty seven,
fully automatic, seven to six to a minute ago. I
(18:25):
really don't want to pull them all up onto my
on board and immediately be outnumbered by armed men. They
get picked up by friendly forces. Later, everybody's 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 Niguada. Right,
(18:47):
the thirty two hardcore John Krasinski mercenaries on board the Resolute.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The hardcore Penguin peepers.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Right, 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 if that was true, then I would say that
Maslu was probably even more bad ass, and we're giving
(19:15):
it credit for if that was their original plan was
to board the Niguada and capture it for the Royal
Canadian Geographical Society.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Or maybe the Royal Canadian Geographic Society is affront.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I think I like it better if they're just oh yeah,
some kind of League of Extraordinary gentleman kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah,
So there's 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 Venezuelan warship.
They rip it in half with the with their A
one super bulbous prow and they keep on going and
(19:48):
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 the Heritage Adventurer and
they will. They are offering Antarctic cruises if you want
to take a ride on a bad Ass, which maybe
(20:09):
I should rephrase that you can do that.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Okay, yeah, okay, So I'm not going to touch that.
But while we're on the topic of disobeying orders, we're
on the topic of just staying the course, sitting tight.
We'll talk about Stanislov Petrov, the man who saved the
world after this break. So hey, welcome back, badasses. Let's
(20:41):
time travel to September nineteen eighty three. A Korean Airlines
passenger jet had just straight into Soviet airspace. The Soviet military,
thinking it was yet another US spyplane, shot it down
just in case, killing two hundred and sixty nine passengers
(21:02):
and crew members. Meanwhile, in the USSR, Yuria Dropoff is
General Secretary and he does not trust the US. He's
got his reasons. Even before the Korean passenger playing, the
Soviets had learned about a US area reconnaissance mission, and
they were prone to interpret everything as just one hair
away from a reason to retaliate. Tensions were high. Oh yeah,
(21:27):
it's the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Yeah, and this is Cold War in the eighties. This
isn't like spies in suits on the bridge in West Berlin.
This is war games with Matthew Broderick. This is Top
Gun with Maverick shooting down MiGs over the Mediterranean. This
is Red Dawn and Invasion USA with Chuck Norris. This
is that time period. So we are talking thermonuclear war.
(21:54):
Hide under your desks, but with hairspray.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
So let's zoom in to a military bunker about eighty
miles south of Moscow. This is Serpokov fifteen. 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
(22:19):
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 cigarette because it's nineteen eighty three,
and he gets a call. What's this all about? Petrov wonders,
(22:43):
military orders, no doubt, but what sort everyone's on edge
right now, and he's stationed here at Serprakov fifteen, the
military bunker that's the location of the western center of
the USSR's early warning ballistic missile detection system on a
good day for a lot of sitting around and nothing happening.
Was this going to be a good day? He answers
(23:07):
the call, Comrade Petrov doll. Turns out the usual guy
couldn't make it in that day, so Lieutenant Colonel Stans left.
Petrov had to cover his shift for him. Remember we're
in the middle of the Cold War. There's a nuclear
threat arms race. The Soviets had a policy of mutual
assured destruction.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
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. And we're as
close as we've been since the Cuban missile crisis really
(23:44):
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 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.
(24:04):
So if you want to start with us, we'll just
make sure that nobody walks out of here alive, and hopefully.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
That's enough of a threat to not actually escalate things.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
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
(24:35):
war forever. 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
That's crazy, but people going to peek. Nobody thinks like that, right, No,
nobody thinks like that.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Nobody is that much of a madman.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
But but but even though of course no one would
ever actually think that, you have to wonder, there's a
little thought in the back of your head, what if
someone actually does 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
(25:18):
on his control panel. Lots of dials, blinking lights, dingy metal,
beige fixtures. I'm assuming everything is beige.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Just like HBO chair noble.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Right, Yeah, yeah, Lots and lots.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Of socialist architecture, socialist architecture, socialist nukeproof architecture.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
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?
(25:54):
What would you do? Ben in that moment?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Let's talk for a second about what 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 an ICBM launch from
Europe or the United States. And so he's got two
(26:23):
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. Okay, if it's a
nuke and you don't push that button right now, that
(26:46):
mutually assured destructions 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.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
It was your fault for hesitating at the button, right And.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
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
Cormack McCarthy novel, Yeah, the foreseeable future. Everybody's going to
be mad maxing around Australia and it's just going to
be this nightmare reality that nobody's happy with.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
In that moment, with this decision tree, with major consequences
going through his head, what does Lieutenant Colonel Staslov Petrov do?
Does he hit the button? He decides this has got
to be an error. Something about it, like his hunch
(27:46):
tells him it's, you know, maybe one of those things
that you mentioned. Man, 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 remember the way
(28:07):
they reacted to that Korean Airlines flight.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
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 bulleted,
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
(28:32):
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 it? My
boss isn't going to completely overreact and nuke Earth. But
(28:53):
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 my cell and it was like,
it's that like dereliction of duty. Am I going to
end up in a gulag like beaten rocks with a
pickaxe for the rest of my life in Siberia?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Exactly? This is what's going through his head. This is
what's at stake for him personally and for the world.
And you know where where's his hunch coming from. Well,
he knows that. Okay, the equipment, the thing that he's seeing,
it's only registering five missiles. That seems on the low side.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It's more than one.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Okay, okay, it's more than one. It's more than zero.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
You know, the top five population centers in Russia are
a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
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
it's something weird happens, and a message like this is
supposed to go through thirty layers of verification, and Petrov
(29:58):
thought 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'd expect ground radar to pick up evidence
to corroborate what Petrov is 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
(30:24):
just has to wait. Are the nukes real? Only one
way to find out?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, because it doesn't. It's not instant. It's not like
a torpedo in the movies. You gotta wait, and it's
like somewhere in the like five to fifteen minute range
where you just got to sit there with your decision
and stew and panic second guess yourself.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, in my head, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette.
I don't know if that was feasible.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I just I'm like, I'm sure he was whatever. He's
smoking them wherever he was insight or out smoking. If
you got him, it's the end of the world nineteen
eighty three.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's a butterfly flapping its wings in North Dakota caused
the tsunami in Moscow. Yeah, chaos theory meets mutually assured destruction.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Oh dear, oh dear, that's true chaos. That's just chaos.
That's no longer chaos theory. That's just chaos. And they
later corrected all this by cross referencing a satellite in
a different orbit, and there was no World War three.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Stanislav Petrov, having zero confidence in his superiors, paid off
for him.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, and that's how you and I been were sitting
here talking about this as opposed to not existing.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
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 two thousands, the US was
actually sending a lot of sometimes military but sometimes civilian
contractors and engineers over to Russia, the Russian Federation, because
(32:15):
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 US and Europe sent technicians and engineers over there
(32:38):
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 this serious def con to defcon on situation.
(33:02):
But I wrote about it in O 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 badass of the Weak article on it,
which I feel very proud about. In a weird way.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
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 interest.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
He didn't tell anybody, right, he didn't. He didn't say
anything to anybody. But he was just like, h yeah,
let's just pretend this didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, he did not enter it into the war diary.
He was subjected to intense interrogation by his superiors. I
bet that was not fun.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
No, I feel like the Soviets were kind of famous
for their intense interrogations.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I mean, you know, Gulag and Siberia on one hand,
you know international acclaim on the other. Like, I think
writing the center is kind of a holding the course.
Probably fine in the.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Grand scheme of things. Yeah, he didn't receive some recognition eventually.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, once the story came out, once everything started to
kind of be declassified, the story came out, and Petrov
was an interesting guy. He was a career army guy,
so he had kind of come up flying fighter aircraft
during World War Two, which is pretty awesome. And yeah,
and then he had this whole long career with the
early warning detection systems, and this one moment, this one
(34:51):
decision he made, which was to do nothing, really is
the thing that he's the most recognized for. And now
there's a Santislav Petrov Day on September twenty six 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.
(35:12):
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 twenty seventeen, I believe.
But he's one of these great, like truly unsung heroes.
(35:36):
It unsung for twenty 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 track across North Dakota,
wondering whether it's headed for Saint Petersburg.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know, yeah, yeah, this is.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Kind of a rarity for us. Pat, we have two
badasses and zero dead bodies at the end of the episode.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Indeed, yeah, go figure.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
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. Badass of the Week is
an iHeartRadio podcast produced by High five Content. Executive producers
are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson, and my co host,
doctor Pat Larish. Writing by Me and Pat, story editing
(36:29):
by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs, and Allie Lemer. Mixing and
music and sound design by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May.
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio. Badass of the
Week is based off my website badassodek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions or ideas,
hit me up at Badass podcast at Badass ofdthwek dot com.
(36:50):
If you like the podcast, please subscribe, follow, listen, tell
your friends, tell your enemies, and 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
podcast content.
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Stanislav sits in front of the control panel, staring at
a bunch of blinking lights and dials, daydreaming about the
bowl of borsh he's going to eat later. It's another
day in paradise. Not maybe it's time for a smoke break,
he thinks. Then, oh shit, that's not his microwave popcorn
(00:28):
going off. That's the USSR's Early Warning Ballistic Missile detection
system and those beeps mean incoming nukes. But is this
really World War three or some kind of technical malfunction.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov stares at the big red launch
(00:49):
button on his control panel. He has three minutes to decide.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I am here as always
with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how you
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Doing okay?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
How are you Ben doing okay? We have kind of
a fun set of stories today. Usually on this show
we will 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
(01:32):
do the thing they were supposed to do and we're
badass because of it. And this first one that we're
going to talk about is one that 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,
(01:53):
I've been waiting for it for a year.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It sounds nice, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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 cruises, and you know the
kind of world quarantine began. And then like a week later,
a cruise ship did something badass and I was like,
(02:17):
I got to write about this.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So what is this cruise ship and what did it
do that was so badass?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
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.
(02:45):
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, you
pay them twenty grand and they drive you around Antarctica
to look at penguins and all that stuff. It's a
(03:07):
cruise ship carries about one hundred and forty passengers. But
on this particular day that we're going to talk about,
there's only thirty two 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 into to get some service done
on it. It is one o'clock in the morning on Monday,
(03:31):
March thirtieth, twenty twenty, and these thirty two people are
doing some open water engine maintenance en route from Buenos
Aires to Dutch Curisou. They're thirteen miles off the coast
of La Tortuga, not the one in Haiti and not
the one from the Michael Bolton song. And they're hailed
by another ships, the middle of the night, it's dark.
(03:53):
These guys are sailing, probably just by instrument, and they
get a call from the Venezuelan warship Niguaza. 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 badass, but it's probably
(04:16):
not that much fun because it is Venezuela and this
is the Venezuelan Navy. And yeah, any kind of detainment
sounds like a kind of a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Right 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 in Nicholas
Maduro who is the president. He was Hugo chav as
his vice president, and when he won the election in
twenty eighteen, he did so because he moved the election
date up six months and then he banned all of
(04:47):
the other political parties from voting, and he rules by
decree in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
I think the bad guy in season two of The
Jack Ryan Show on Amazon Prime is based on him.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Could be could very well be.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, yeah, that happens not to have happened in our
actual timeline. So anyway, the guy that he ran against
was recognized by sixty like six zero other countries as
the president of Venezuela, but that didn't really have any
practical effect because Maduro was living in the presidential palace,
(05:34):
they had all the guns, and just a few weeks before,
the US government declared that he was a dictator and
a narco terrorist and they put a fifteen million dollar
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
(05:55):
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. So if you're 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
(06:18):
to not get involved.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, this isn't the highway patrol pulling you over on
nine to ninety five at six o'clock in the afternoon.
This is the official Venezuelan story about these thirty two
members on board the ship was that they were quote
mercenaries sent to attack Venezuelan bases. They must have been
pretty badass mercenaries, because thirty two guys taking over an
(06:40):
entire naval base seems kind of like something you'd see
in a Tom Clancy novel.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Maybe they'd recruited some penguins.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I'm gonna 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
Falkland Islands penguin. There are not that many of them.
They were extremely endangered in the early nineteen eighties and
this war began. The Falclon Islands War was in nineteen
(07:10):
eighty two between England and Argentina. The Argentinians put land
mines throughout big swaths of one of the Falcon Islands,
I think South Falkland Island, and it was actually like
the breeding grounds for these penguins. Oh no, those little
tiny Falcon Island penguins.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Horrible.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It's horrible, except that the Falkland Island penguin. Most land
mines require certain amount of weight, and the Falkland Island
penguin is not heavy enough to set off the land mine.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
And these things were extremely they were extremely close to
being extinct. There was only less than one hundred of
them I believe alive at the time that this minefield
was planted. And the penguins don't set off the land mines,
but the seals that eat them do the pun. But
the population of the Falkland Island penguin has kind of
(08:03):
exploded in the last couple of decades.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Shang, I see what you did.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
They're no longer in danger. Well that's a badass penguin
from South America. That was a weird transition. But let's
get back into some serious shit.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Here. We have thirty two unarmed crew members of this
cruise ship and they are sailing it into Dutch Currasou
in the Caribbean to like get a drink and sit
on a beach somewhere. And now Nicholas Maduro, narco terrorist
of Venezuela, dictator wanted for crimes all over the world.
(08:43):
He is saying that these thirty two ordinary sailors are
international superspy 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.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Or weeks, who knows how long.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, ransom them, Ransom them back to the Royal Canadian
Geological Society, which I imagine can't afford to them, but
probably Canada will. Somebody's gonna pay to bring these guys
home so they don't just rotten Venezuelan jail or.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Maybe Jack Ryan will rescue them.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Sure right, maybe Jack Ryan, maybe John Krasinski will parachute
in and single handedly rescue them. Okay, you don't want
to be arrested as a terrorist by Nicholas Maduro. So
the captain he radio is into home base with the situation,
Hey got 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 one
(09:37):
o'clock in the morning in the Caribbean. I don't know
what time that makes it. And 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.
What does respond is a seventy six millimeter artillery shell
fired from the Venezuelan warship Niguada, fires across his bow
just to really, they're not trying to hit him, but
(09:58):
they're shooting a warning shot at him to let it know. Hey,
pull over, pull the vehicle over to the shoulder, get
your licensed registration, prepare to be boarded. So the captain
radio's back again to headquarters and he says, look, you know,
international waters start at twelve miles off the coast of
(10:18):
the land, and we are thirteen thirteen and a half
miles off the coast of Venezuela. We are in international waters. Now.
I don't want to be considered mercenary or terrorist or whatever.
Don't love the shooting things. I 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 RCGS Resolute
(10:40):
is actually kind of a badass ship. It has already
been arrested twice.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
How do you arrest a cruise ship or do you
mean arrest the people on the cruise ship or what
like the RCGS Resolute. You have the right to remain.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Silent, honestly kind of. So the ship was arrested in
Ninevet in August of twenty nineteen. And there's a quote
from the guy, the arresting officer. He's none of it,
PD or whatever. A guy named Thomas Payton, he said. Quote.
What stood out was that it was an actual cruise
ship that needed to be arrested. This does not happen
(11:15):
very often. End quote. So the ship was placed under
arrest because the owners of the ship owed one hundred
thousand dollars 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 worked something out,
and the ship was was let free. The ship was
arrested again under similar circumstances in November of twenty nineteen.
(11:35):
She was in Buenos Aires, and same thing owed money
was arrested by the Argentinian police. Uh oh, 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 ass.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
No, that is not bad.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Don't add it's just bad, right. Badass of the Week
podcast does not endoorse Not paying people for things that
you said you were going to pay them for, especially
when they are nonprofits dedicated to saving penguins. I 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.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
I mean, I'm making certain assumptions here, but yeah, I
think it's correct.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The Magotta is heavily armed. It's the flagship of the
Venezuelan Navy. Means it's 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 seventy six millimeter main cannon. It's got a
couple of twelve point seven millimeters anti aircraft guns, and
(12:38):
it carries something called the millennium gun, which sounds like
some kind of super weapon from an anime about giant robots.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
But what is it.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Actually, it's an anti missile shotgun. If somebody shoots missiles
at it, it can kind of spray shotgun at it to
shoot down the missiles. Still millennium gun.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Millennium gun.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, I like it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
I hope that whoever was on, like the publicity department
for the millennium gun got promoted. Okay, So let's recap
RCSG Resolute. Thirty two 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 seventy six millimeters cannon.
(13:19):
There are forty four Venezuelan sailors on board the Niguada.
They are angry. They are yelling for the Resolute to
pull over. You are the Resolute pat What do you
do in this situation? Knowing what we know about the
Resolute being kind of fuck the police kind of operation?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Resolute, going back to what we talked about in the open,
it did nothing. It held its course completely straight.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It was resolute.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It was resolute, just kept going straight. The Iguada fires
a second warning shot, and then they fire a third
morning shot. A seventy six milimeters shell is big. It
will knock out warships, forget about cruise ships. But the
Resolute continues straight. Then Neiguada doesn't want to sink this ship.
They want to ransom it or investigate it, or interrogate
(14:15):
these people or whatever. So they try to ram it
with their warship. I believe this is 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. So they try to ram it to stop
it and slow it down. It bounces off. Okay, they
try to ram it again. That doesn't work. Then they
(14:35):
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 aks
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 changeing cores.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Body in motion, stays in motion exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
So the Niguada gets annoyed and it tries to ram
it up near the front.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
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 a definition something that like is good at
smashing things.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
It's very good at smashing things. It turns out, yes,
this is an Antarctic ice breaker, which it 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 nineteen ninety three in Finland. Its official icebreaker
rating from the Finnish Swedish Maritime Administration is a one
(15:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Bulbous prow.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yes, a one super bulbous prow. I don't know if
bulbus prow is some kind of not is like an
official nautical term, but it just sounds like something a
British person would use to refer to their junk.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
A one super bulbous prow Resolute going straight. It gets
hit by the Naguada, which is a little smaller, is
eighty meters long. It's not small. It's the flagship of
the Venezuelan Navy. But the resolute's about fifty percent bigure.
It's one hundred and twenty three meters And they hit
and this thing is designed to shear through things, and
it shears through the entire front end of the Niguada.
(16:21):
The ship starts to go down. All those forty four
marines who were shooting their aks 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 the Naguada,
the prize of the Venezuelan Navy, along with its famed
Millennium Gun, are sinking to the bottom of the Caribbean,
(16:41):
and the Resolute continues to not change course. The moral
of the story here is that when you're packing large
boor 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
(17:04):
on board and is designed for like smashing glaciers. The
captain of the Resolute radio to the guys in the water, like, hey,
do you want some help? Didn't get a message back
immediately and was like, yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just
gonna keep on going. I'm just gonna keep rolling on too, Currisou.
And they do. They roll straight on into Dutch Curisou.
(17:24):
The Naguada capsizes, sinks.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Leaving the guys floating.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
In all, forty four people are are are rescued, so
nobody dies in this, okay, in this situation here.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
I mean, I wasn't rooting for the Venezuelan soldiers, but
they probably were following orders and okay whatever, no one
got hurt.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
The story is less funny if it ends with forty
four dead bodies, you know, like yeah, yeah. The captain
of the Resolute, he is who I can never find
his name, 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
(18:02):
you do have to protect this guy's identity. He radio's
into the guys in the water, like, hey, do you
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 forty seven,
fully automatic, seven to six to a minute ago. I
(18:25):
really don't want to pull them all up onto my
on board and immediately be outnumbered by armed men. They
get picked up by friendly forces. Later, everybody's 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 Niguada. Right,
(18:47):
the thirty two hardcore John Krasinski mercenaries on board the Resolute.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The hardcore Penguin peepers.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Right, 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 if that was true, then I would say that
Maslu was probably even more bad ass, and we're giving
(19:15):
it credit for if that was their original plan was
to board the Niguada and capture it for the Royal
Canadian Geographical Society.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Or maybe the Royal Canadian Geographic Society is affront.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I think I like it better if they're just oh yeah,
some kind of League of Extraordinary gentleman kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah,
So there's 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 Venezuelan warship.
They rip it in half with the with their A
one super bulbous prow and they keep on going and
(19:48):
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 the Heritage Adventurer and
they will. They are offering Antarctic cruises if you want
to take a ride on a bad Ass, which maybe
(20:09):
I should rephrase that you can do that.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Okay, yeah, okay, So I'm not going to touch that.
But while we're on the topic of disobeying orders, we're
on the topic of just staying the course, sitting tight.
We'll talk about Stanislov Petrov, the man who saved the
world after this break. So hey, welcome back, badasses. Let's
(20:41):
time travel to September nineteen eighty three. A Korean Airlines
passenger jet had just straight into Soviet airspace. The Soviet military,
thinking it was yet another US spyplane, shot it down
just in case, killing two hundred and sixty nine passengers
(21:02):
and crew members. Meanwhile, in the USSR, Yuria Dropoff is
General Secretary and he does not trust the US. He's
got his reasons. Even before the Korean passenger playing, the
Soviets had learned about a US area reconnaissance mission, and
they were prone to interpret everything as just one hair
away from a reason to retaliate. Tensions were high. Oh yeah,
(21:27):
it's the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Yeah, and this is Cold War in the eighties. This
isn't like spies in suits on the bridge in West Berlin.
This is war games with Matthew Broderick. This is Top
Gun with Maverick shooting down MiGs over the Mediterranean. This
is Red Dawn and Invasion USA with Chuck Norris. This
is that time period. So we are talking thermonuclear war.
(21:54):
Hide under your desks, but with hairspray.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
So let's zoom in to a military bunker about eighty
miles south of Moscow. This is Serpokov fifteen. 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
(22:19):
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 cigarette because it's nineteen eighty three,
and he gets a call. What's this all about? Petrov wonders,
(22:43):
military orders, no doubt, but what sort everyone's on edge
right now, and he's stationed here at Serprakov fifteen, the
military bunker that's the location of the western center of
the USSR's early warning ballistic missile detection system on a
good day for a lot of sitting around and nothing happening.
Was this going to be a good day? He answers
(23:07):
the call, Comrade Petrov doll. Turns out the usual guy
couldn't make it in that day, so Lieutenant Colonel Stans left.
Petrov had to cover his shift for him. Remember we're
in the middle of the Cold War. There's a nuclear
threat arms race. The Soviets had a policy of mutual
assured destruction.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
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. And we're as
close as we've been since the Cuban missile crisis really
(23:44):
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 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.
(24:04):
So if you want to start with us, we'll just
make sure that nobody walks out of here alive, and hopefully.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
That's enough of a threat to not actually escalate things.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
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
(24:35):
war forever. 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
That's crazy, but people going to peek. Nobody thinks like that, right, No,
nobody thinks like that.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Nobody is that much of a madman.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
But but but even though of course no one would
ever actually think that, you have to wonder, there's a
little thought in the back of your head, what if
someone actually does 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
(25:18):
on his control panel. Lots of dials, blinking lights, dingy metal,
beige fixtures. I'm assuming everything is beige.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Just like HBO chair noble.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Right, Yeah, yeah, Lots and lots.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Of socialist architecture, socialist architecture, socialist nukeproof architecture.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
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?
(25:54):
What would you do? Ben in that moment?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Let's talk for a second about what 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 an ICBM launch from
Europe or the United States. And so he's got two
(26:23):
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. Okay, if it's a
nuke and you don't push that button right now, that
(26:46):
mutually assured destructions 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.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
It was your fault for hesitating at the button, right And.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
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
Cormack McCarthy novel, Yeah, the foreseeable future. Everybody's going to
be mad maxing around Australia and it's just going to
be this nightmare reality that nobody's happy with.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
In that moment, with this decision tree, with major consequences
going through his head, what does Lieutenant Colonel Staslov Petrov do?
Does he hit the button? He decides this has got
to be an error. Something about it, like his hunch
(27:46):
tells him it's, you know, maybe one of those things
that you mentioned. Man, 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 remember the way
(28:07):
they reacted to that Korean Airlines flight.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
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 bulleted,
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
(28:32):
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 it? My
boss isn't going to completely overreact and nuke Earth. But
(28:53):
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 my cell and it was like,
it's that like dereliction of duty. Am I going to
end up in a gulag like beaten rocks with a
pickaxe for the rest of my life in Siberia?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Exactly? This is what's going through his head. This is
what's at stake for him personally and for the world.
And you know where where's his hunch coming from. Well,
he knows that. Okay, the equipment, the thing that he's seeing,
it's only registering five missiles. That seems on the low side.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It's more than one.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Okay, okay, it's more than one. It's more than zero.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
You know, the top five population centers in Russia are
a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
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
it's something weird happens, and a message like this is
supposed to go through thirty layers of verification, and Petrov
(29:58):
thought 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'd expect ground radar to pick up evidence
to corroborate what Petrov is 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
(30:24):
just has to wait. Are the nukes real? Only one
way to find out?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, because it doesn't. It's not instant. It's not like
a torpedo in the movies. You gotta wait, and it's
like somewhere in the like five to fifteen minute range
where you just got to sit there with your decision
and stew and panic second guess yourself.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, in my head, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette.
I don't know if that was feasible.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I just I'm like, I'm sure he was whatever. He's
smoking them wherever he was insight or out smoking. If
you got him, it's the end of the world nineteen
eighty three.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's a butterfly flapping its wings in North Dakota caused
the tsunami in Moscow. Yeah, chaos theory meets mutually assured destruction.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Oh dear, oh dear, that's true chaos. That's just chaos.
That's no longer chaos theory. That's just chaos. And they
later corrected all this by cross referencing a satellite in
a different orbit, and there was no World War three.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Stanislav Petrov, having zero confidence in his superiors, paid off
for him.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, and that's how you and I been were sitting
here talking about this as opposed to not existing.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
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 two thousands, the US was
actually sending a lot of sometimes military but sometimes civilian
contractors and engineers over to Russia, the Russian Federation, because
(32:15):
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 US and Europe sent technicians and engineers over there
(32:38):
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 this serious def con to defcon on situation.
(33:02):
But I wrote about it in O 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 badass of the Weak article on it,
which I feel very proud about. In a weird way.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
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 interest.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
He didn't tell anybody, right, he didn't. He didn't say
anything to anybody. But he was just like, h yeah,
let's just pretend this didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, he did not enter it into the war diary.
He was subjected to intense interrogation by his superiors. I
bet that was not fun.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
No, I feel like the Soviets were kind of famous
for their intense interrogations.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I mean, you know, Gulag and Siberia on one hand,
you know international acclaim on the other. Like, I think
writing the center is kind of a holding the course.
Probably fine in the.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Grand scheme of things. Yeah, he didn't receive some recognition eventually.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, once the story came out, once everything started to
kind of be declassified, the story came out, and Petrov
was an interesting guy. He was a career army guy,
so he had kind of come up flying fighter aircraft
during World War Two, which is pretty awesome. And yeah,
and then he had this whole long career with the
early warning detection systems, and this one moment, this one
(34:51):
decision he made, which was to do nothing, really is
the thing that he's the most recognized for. And now
there's a Santislav Petrov Day on September twenty six 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.
(35:12):
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 twenty seventeen, I believe.
But he's one of these great, like truly unsung heroes.
(35:36):
It unsung for twenty 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 track across North Dakota,
wondering whether it's headed for Saint Petersburg.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know, yeah, yeah, this is.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Kind of a rarity for us. Pat, we have two
badasses and zero dead bodies at the end of the episode.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Indeed, yeah, go figure.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
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. Badass of the Week is
an iHeartRadio podcast produced by High five Content. Executive producers
are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson, and my co host,
doctor Pat Larish. Writing by Me and Pat, story editing
(36:29):
by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs, and Allie Lemer. Mixing and
music and sound design by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May.
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio. Badass of the
Week is based off my website badassodek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions or ideas,
hit me up at Badass podcast at Badass ofdthwek dot com.
(36:50):
If you like the podcast, please subscribe, follow, listen, tell
your friends, tell your enemies, and 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
podcast content.
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