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Ingratitude Was All These People Got For Doing the Right Thing

Khalid Elhassan August 28, 2023 32 min

Ingratitude - Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating — Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating. NPR

The Unknown Stanislav Petrov

Few know of Stanislav Petrov is. It is unfortunate, because everybody alive today, anywhere in the world, owes him a huge debt of gratitude. In a highly stressful moment, he acted on a gut instinct, placed a huge responsibility upon his own shoulders, and saved the world from a full blown nuclear holocaust. In a nutshell, if not for Petrov, most of us would not be alive today. The few still alive would be struggling for survival in some radioactive Mad Max post-apocalyptic landscape. The ingratitude of his bosses was all he got.

Early in the morning of September 26^th, 1983, Soviet early warning systems detected an incoming missile strike. Computer readouts confirmed the warning, and advised that several American missiles had been launched. Soviet protocol called for an immediate response by launching their own missiles. Petrov was the duty officer in charge, and his job was to immediately alert the Soviet leadership to launch missiles.

As he described it decades later: “I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it“. You are able to read this today because, as seen below, he chose a different course of action.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.