What Might Have Never Been...
- Attfield Dutt
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
I’ve just come across a startling piece in this week’s edition of The Friend about a Russian officer during the Cold War who was on duty one chilly night in 1983 – two days before my youngest child celebrated turning nine, as it happens. Stanislav Petrov worked with an early warn youing system designed to detect nuclear missiles. As luck would have it, the alarm went off on his shift, which meant he was obliged to report it. If he had done so, his superiors would then have had to launch a retaliatory attack on the USA – and the Rest would not have been History but – well, simply nothing: we would none of us have survived. But he waited a few minutes, because he did not trust the technology that was supposed to detect a nuclear attack. He believed it had not been fully tested, and clearly he was right.
Around this time, I published my first novel Rubik’s Cube which was set amongst some Quakers in Cardiff. It’s about ordinary domestic situations – neighbours who persecute children just wanting to play ball games in their road, another neighbour who refuses to leave her bungalow even for her husband’s funeral, a character who believes in doing the little things to help the people she comes across rather than getting involved in large scale political issues; all that was based on my experience at the time. There’s also a love story involving a man who is slowly going blind and a woman whose hair is rather a mess, but overarching the whole story is the threat of nuclear war. For the novel I moved Greenham Common to the Wenallt, the hillside just north of Cardiff, with a Peace Camp outside an American cruise missile base. A friendship springs up between the commander of the base and the local Quakers, but at the end a flock of birds is mistaken for an incoming Russian attack. If a publisher ever asks me to rewrite this novel from four decades ago, perhaps I should remember Stanislav Petrov and rewrite the ending?
For information on how to read Rubik’s Cube, drop me a line at
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