Yesterday I mentioned the story of Johnny Dahlquist, the character in Robert Heinlein's 1948 short story "The Long Watch" who, when given the order to prepare for nuclear war, decided instead to use his technical skills to disable the nukes that his superior officers were (it turned out) planning on using for a global coup d'etat. I gave it as an example of something I like to see in my fiction, namely hope, specifically the hope that any ordinary person in the right place at the right time can reasonably hope to do the right thing when it really matters. Maybe you think that's unrealistic of me, but I think that's backwards. I can't stand the fiction of despair because, frankly, that's not how the world really works.

Hope is not irrational. For example, the reason that you and I are having this conversation is that there really were, not in fiction but in reality, more than three Johnny Dahlquists. We did not survive the Cold War without a global nuclear exchange by accident or by luck or by clever strategy. We survived the Cold War because every time nuclear war was about to start, one or more of the people, not necessarily at the top of the military command chain but sometimes even at the bottom said, "No."

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there came a point at which a panicky President Kennedy decided (not unreasonably) that he needed an update on the launch readiness of the Russian missiles in Cuba, and needed it faster than a U2 spy plane could bring it back. So a flight of US fighter jets was dispatched to quickly overfly the missile sites and report back. What he didn't know at the time, what nobody knew, was that the Russian officers on site were told that there was one and only one circumstance where they were authorized to launch on their own, rather than waiting for orders from Moscow. Their standing orders anticipated that the only circumstance under which the US would actually attack a Russian missile site would be if World War III had already begun; if they saw American fighter planes approaching their position, they were under orders to launch at once rather than risk having their retaliatory strike capability bombed away from them. The Russian officer on site saw the American fighters approaching and began the launch sequence. His Cuban Army liaison shot him to death rather than let him start WW III.

Some years after that, the senior missile control officer for the whole Soviet Union was on duty late one night when the whole Russian early-warning radar system lit up with tracks that could not possibly be anything other than an entire swarm of US nuclear bombers crossing into Russia, heading towards every radar position. Standing orders said that if multiple radars agreed, and he could not prove that they were in error through visual confirmation in less time than it would take the bombers to wipe out his radar stations, he was to initiate a total nation-wide launch of every missile aimed at the US and Europe. It being the middle of the night, he knew there was no way to get visual verification. So instead, he checked the newspapers, concluded on his own authority that this was an unlikely day for the Americans to attack because tensions were fairly low, and decided to risk not giving the launch order. When his KGB political officer attempted to countermand that order, he ordered his troops to hold the KGB officer at gunpoint and shoot him if he approached the command console. That he turned out to be right that it was a software glitch didn't save his career, he was still demoted for pulling a gun on a political officer and retired to relative obscurity many years later.

Some years after that, before the US was officially in the Vietnam War, US pilots were sent along with American bomber aircraft that we gave the South Vietnamese. Our pilots were supposed to train the Vietnamese to run bombing missions against North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had been given Russian fighter jets and trained to intercept and shoot down those bombers. But both sides' trainers ran into so many problems training their Vietnamese clients that they gave up and quietly flew the missions themselves. The pilots for both sides caught each other at this, almost immediately. Both sides' pilots had long before been given standing orders: if in any combat zone they came under fire from the other side's aircraft, they were to report that immediately to their superiors, as it may have been the beginning of World War III. What we found out, when the pilots for both sides admitted this to reporters only a few years back, was that both sides' pilots discussed this among themselves, and independently of each other both sides concluded that they were all going to disobey that order, for fear that someone above them in the chain of command would give the launch orders for a nuclear war.

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of Heinlein's characters made the point that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea would later make in Illuminatus, and that is that ultimately, all chains of command are illusions. Every order that is given ends up in the hands of a self-aware moral individual with his or her own responsibility to decide whether or not that order is the right thing to do. Yes, some people abdicate their moral responsibilities and do what they're told, sometimes even whole armies of them. If such things never happened, then Hitler's army wouldn't have obeyed the order to march in to Czechoslovakia and Bush's army would never have obeyed the order to march into Iraq. Nevertheless, our history and our economy and everything about our lives would be much, much worse than it is if the world and its history were not literally full of people who decide every day, no matter what they were told or what the people around them are doing, to do the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do.

And any auther whose fiction does not reflect this fundamental reality misunderstands the human race so severely that I find it flatly unreadable. Any book whose characters are all greedy selfish monsters or morally bankrupt obedient automatons is simply too unrealistic to hold my attention.