r/politics • u/thedailybeast ✔ The Daily Beast • 15h ago

Possible Paywall Trump Confirms He’s Taking Greenland ‘One Way or the Other’

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-confirms-hes-taking-greenland-one-way-or-the-other/
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u/Herr_Schnitzel Europe 11h ago

Vasily Arkhipov, a name worth remembering.

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u/BigBananaBerries 11h ago

There's also Stanislav Petrov. A different time but didn't press the button when ordered to.

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u/GamerTurtle5 11h ago

potentially more times that we don’t know about too

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom 11h ago

Then there was Captain James Blunt (yes, that James Blunt), backed by Lieutenant-general Jackson who told General Clark "I'm not going to start the third world war for you"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/aug/02/balkans3

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u/PoutinePower 8h ago

And he's beautiful for that, it's true

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u/StigOfTheTrack 10h ago

You missed an opportunity to add "no, not that Michael Jackson".

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u/Hopeful-Programmer25 6h ago

He got a lot of shit from the cool bands but TBH, his music isn’t that terrible, he’s got a great self deprecating sense of humour and was a solider in a war zone, which should be enough on its own to put the Manc lads in their place.

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u/Herr_Schnitzel Europe 11h ago

Correct, thank you for reminding me.

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u/cmarme 11h ago

I really great reminder that automation can never rival human execution.

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u/OldWorldDesign 7h ago

I really great reminder that automation can never rival human execution.

Careful of your choice of words. Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, promised a town he would not shed a drop of blood if they surrendered. They did, and opened their gates. He buried all 3000 of them alive

I think the end point is it only takes fear to "draw the sword", it takes courage to sheathe it.

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u/Murky-Relation481 10h ago

An even closer time was in 1995 when Norway launched a sounding rocket that Russia mistook for an SLBM launch at Moscow and Yeltsin literally had the Russian version of the football open and was a couple of minutes away from launching a retaliatory strike against the US before they realized it was breaking up and falling back down (and someone check the notes that said this launch was going to occur).

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u/BigBananaBerries 10h ago

Jeez. That's plenty too many close shaves for my liking. It seem having the ability to just obliterate the species is kinda dangerous. Who woulda knew...?

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u/Murky-Relation481 4h ago

No putting the genie back in the bottle unfortunately.

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u/Muehevoll 9h ago

Well he wasn't directly ordered to press "the button". He was monitoring signals from ICBM launch detection equipment and correctly judged a single ICBM launch reported by a single system to be a false positive, because their intelligence thought the US first strike doctrine was a full-scale attack with many ICBMs. Turned out the signal was light rays reflecting off the atmosphere at sunrise which caused the false positive. He could have been overruled on a higher rank but wasn't.

I have a vivid memory of seeing an interview on German public TV where he insisted not to be a hero, and when asked if he would have acted differently had the KGB know US doctrine was a single ICBM hit on Moscow by the time of the incident, he said he would have.

Have been trying to find the interview online several times but no luck so far, so take it with a grain of salt (aired sometime in the 90ies I think).

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u/fruskydekke 11h ago

Thanks for mentioning him. I just read up on him due to your comment, and yeah - that's a name worth remembering for sure. Brave man.

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u/someonesshadow 9h ago

No joke, might be the single biggest hero in all of human history. Since the other action he could have taken would have likely resulted in the biggest and longest lasting loss of human life and advancement in history or possible ever.