Apocalypse postponed - on Cold War, Babylon Burning, epic chess games

When I was a teenager, back during the Cold War, I underwent some basic training in how to deal with the nuclear apocalypse we were expecting then any day soon.

It was an annual Civil Defence seminar, for community leaders. And although the only community leader in our house was my father, a county councillor, he was never too fond of sitting in classrooms, so delegated this job to me.

Thus it was that I learned about coping with nuclear fall-out, most likely following an attack on our neighbours in the UK. A lot of it was simple self-preservation: piling sandbags against the outer walls of the house, then retreating to the safest room with a good supply of food and the family pets (in case you had to eat them too).

Once the house was secured, you would emerge periodically and take measurements outside with a Geiger Counter, which would have been issued at the first sign of trouble. You would then phone the numbers to Dublin, possibly to somebody in a bunker. My memories are a bit vague now, to be honest (I might have made up the part about the pets). Shamefully, the thing I remember best is the chicken and chips we always got for lunch.

Fall rising - On harvest moons and other happenings

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General absolution: In memory of my friend, Steve Dunford

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Two-bob job – Frank McNally on the Dantesque origins of a classic Irish coin

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Fretful departed: the art of cutting it fine for trains

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While we waited for the Cold War to turn hot, the airwaves were a battleground for propaganda. This was the era of Radio Free Europe, still in existence and with a different focus, and Radio Moscow, which seemed to be all over the wireless, cropping up repeatedly as you turned the dial.

Even the amp I bought with a secondhand electric guitar circa 1979 picked up Radio Moscow. Every time I turned it on while trying to learn the chords of Babylon’s Burning, a punk classic of the period, I would hear the latest predictions of western capitalism’s imminent doom.

There was no escaping the great east-west conflict then. Another battleground was chess. That had come to a head in the autumn of 1978, when in an epic world championship match that dragged on for four months, amid allegations of spying, hypnotism and the covert use of colour-coded yoghurts, Anatoly Karpov beat Viktor Korchnoi 6-5.

Both men were Russian, but Karpov was the Soviet poster boy while Korchnoi was a defector and darling of the West. I used to follow the games avidly in the newspaper, sometimes playing out the moves on a chessboard late at night when I couldn’t sleep.

Sleeplessness was a frequent occurrence at the time. What with the stress of being a community leader, the looming apocalypse, Babylon Burning, etc, I think I had actual insomnia for a while. Vicarious playing of a world championship chess match, itself a surrogate war, was one way of passing the nights.

The whole thing petered out harmlessly enough in the end. I never did get my personal Geiger Counter or have to worry about filling sandbags. And like a lot of once-feared things that didn’t happen, the temptation now is think it was never likely in the first place, that there were too many sane people on both sides.

But now I see that this weekend marks the 38th anniversary of something called the “1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident”, which was not reported at the time or for many years afterwards.

It occurred when, just after midnight on September 26th, the USSR's computerised early-warning system signalled a launch by the US of several intercontinental ballistic missiles. Luckily, a man named Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet airforce officer on duty at the command centre where the warning was received, rightly suspected a false alarm and – in breach of orders – waited for more evidence before reporting it upwards to those who had fingers on buttons.

No evidence emerged. Petrov thereby helped prevent a retaliation to the non-attack, which would likely have precipitated a retaliation to the retaliation, and maybe all-out war. Of course, when none of that happened, again the temptation is to think it couldn’t have, because of built-in safeguards.

But this was a time of intense mutual suspicion between the superpowers and when the Soviet Union was crumbling dangerously, as Chernobyl soon demonstrated.

The 1983 incident was hushed up and Petrov’s career did not thrive afterwards because he had exposed uncomfortable truths. Now dead, he did at least live to see himself the hero of an award-winning Danish-made documentary in 2013.

Made 30 years after the event and suggesting that some of us were closer than we ever realised to receiving Geiger Counters in the post, it was called The Man Who Saved the World.