Sermon Illustrations

The Arms Race was on; we no longer feared atomic bombs, but the H-bomb. Bomb shelters would not protect against that greater level of destruction.

At one point, we were a button away from a nuclear holocaust. According to wikipedia.com, “Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov…. was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm.

“His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war which could have wiped out half of the population of the countries involved.”

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