The Man Who Saved the World From Nuclear War and Nobody Knows His Name

 On September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at a Soviet nuclear early warning facility outside Moscow.

His job was simple in theory. If the system detected incoming American nuclear missiles he was supposed to report it up the chain of command. That report would have triggered the Soviet nuclear response protocol. Missiles would have launched. The war would have started.

At 12:15 AM the system screamed at him.

Five nuclear missiles, the computer said. Launched from the United States. Inbound.

Stanislav Petrov had about four minutes to decide what to do.

What He Knew and What He Did Not Know

Petrov knew that the United States had thousands of nuclear warheads. He also knew that if the Americans were going to start a nuclear war they would not launch five missiles. They would launch everything. A first strike with five missiles made no strategic sense.

He also knew that the early warning system was new and had not been fully tested. He suspected it might be malfunctioning.

He had no way to confirm either assumption. He had four minutes. The screens kept screaming. His subordinates were watching him.

He picked up the phone and told his superiors it was a false alarm.

He was right. The system had been fooled by an unusual alignment of sunlight and cloud conditions over a US missile base that the satellite had mistaken for a launch signature.

If he had reported it as a genuine attack the Soviet command would have had to decide whether to launch before American missiles arrived. Given the political climate of 1983, one of the tensest points of the entire Cold War, the chance that they would have launched in response was real.

What Happened to Him Afterward

Petrov was not celebrated. He was reprimanded for failing to properly log the incident in his paperwork. He was eventually reassigned to a less sensitive post. He had a nervous breakdown from the stress of the experience. He retired on a modest pension and lived quietly.

He was largely unknown outside a small circle of researchers until the 1990s when documents from the incident were declassified. Even then he did not become a household name. He died in 2017. Most of the world did not notice.

He is sometimes called the man who saved the world. That description is accurate. And he spent most of his life not being thanked for it.

There are almost certainly other moments like this in the history of the nuclear age that we do not know about. Moments where one person's judgment call in a high-pressure situation prevented a catastrophe. The historical record of near-misses is incomplete because the governments involved classified what they could and publicized what served their interests.

Stanislav Petrov made the right call in four minutes in the dark with the world on the line. Write his name down.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Cadaver Synod Was the Most Disturbing Trial in History and the Defendant Was Already Dead

 In January of 897 Pope Stephen VI ordered that the body of his predecessor Pope Formosus be exhumed from its grave.

Formosus had been dead for nine months.

Stephen had the corpse dressed in papal vestments, propped up in a chair, and placed on trial before a church court. A deacon was assigned to speak on behalf of the dead man since Formosus could not speak for himself.

Stephen himself reportedly shouted accusations at the corpse and at one point demanded to know why Formosus had usurped the papacy when he had no right to it.

This event is called the Cadaver Synod. It is real. It is documented. And it is one of the most extraordinary things that has ever happened in the history of organized religion.

What Was Actually Going On

The Cadaver Synod was not pure madness. It was politics dressed up as theology, which is not unusual in the history of the church.

Pope Formosus had been involved in a series of political conflicts between competing noble factions that were fighting for control of the papacy and the Italian states around Rome. He had crowned a particular claimant as Holy Roman Emperor. Stephen VI was aligned with a different faction that wanted that coronation invalidated and that wanted to retroactively delegitimize Formosus's actions.

By convicting Formosus of crimes posthumously Stephen could invalidate every ordination and act Formosus had performed during his papacy. This had enormous practical political consequences for the factions involved.

The trial proceeded. The corpse was found guilty. The three fingers on Formosus's right hand that he had used for ordinations were cut off. The body was stripped of its vestments, dressed in regular clothes, and thrown into the Tiber River.

What Happened Next

The Cadaver Synod did not end well for Stephen VI.

The Roman populace was outraged by what had happened. A popular uprising seized Stephen, removed him from the papacy, and threw him in prison. He was strangled in his cell a few months later.

His successors reversed the Cadaver Synod. The body of Formosus was retrieved from the Tiber and reburied with honor. The convictions were annulled. The ordinations were declared valid.

All of that accomplished nothing politically because the underlying power struggle between the factions continued for years afterward.

What This Story Tells Us

The Cadaver Synod is extreme. The image of a sitting pope shouting accusations at a dressed-up corpse is extraordinary. But what it describes is not extreme at all by historical standards.

It is an institution using every tool available to it, including the most bizarre and theatrical ones, to serve the political interests of the faction that currently controlled it.

Using religious authority and religious proceedings to settle political scores is one of the oldest patterns in the history of institutions. The Cadaver Synod is just the most dramatic example you will ever find.

It is also a reminder that the closer you look at history the stranger it gets. Most people know that medieval church politics were complicated and sometimes violent. Almost nobody knows that one pope put a dead pope on trial and screamed at the body.

Now you know.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Sudan Has More Ancient Pyramids Than Egypt and Almost Nobody Knows They Exist

 When most people think of pyramids they think of Egypt. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Sphinx. The monuments along the Nile that have defined how the world imagines ancient civilization.

What most people do not know is that Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt.

Not fewer. More.

Sudan has approximately 200 to 255 pyramids compared to around 130 in Egypt. They are concentrated in several sites in the northern part of the country. And most people in the western world have never heard of them.

The Kingdom That Built Them

The pyramids of Sudan were built by the ancient Kingdom of Kush and its successor states, a civilization that existed in the region of Nubia for roughly three thousand years.

Kush was not a minor culture on the margins of ancient history. At its peak the Kingdom of Kush conquered Egypt. For several decades in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Kush actually ruled Egypt as its 25th dynasty. The Kushite pharaohs ruled from Memphis and were recognized as legitimate rulers of both kingdoms.

The Kushite rulers who controlled Egypt built their own pyramids in the Nubian style, steeper and narrower than the Egyptian ones, as royal tombs. Even after Egypt was lost to Assyrian invasion the tradition of pyramid building continued in Nubia for centuries.

The pyramid sites at Meroe, Nuri, and El-Kurru contain hundreds of these structures, many still standing and well-preserved despite being virtually unknown outside of archaeological circles.

Why They Are Not Better Known

The short answer is that African history has been systematically underrepresented in the way the ancient world gets taught in western schools.

The ancient civilizations of sub-Saharan and northeastern Africa built remarkable things. The Kingdom of Kush built sophisticated cities, developed its own writing system, maintained long-distance trade networks, and produced a tradition of monumental architecture that lasted for thousands of years.

But the standard narrative of ancient history focuses heavily on Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. The civilizations that existed alongside and sometimes ahead of those better-known cultures, particularly the African ones, tend to get much less attention.

The result is that millions of people learn about the pyramids of Giza in school and never learn that a civilization south of Egypt was building pyramids at the same time, for the same purposes, and in some respects doing it more prolifically.

The Nubian pyramids are still standing. They are accessible to visitors. UNESCO has designated several of the sites as World Heritage Sites. They are real, significant, and extraordinary.

They just did not fit into the history that most people were taught.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.