The Man That Saved The World
On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines (KAL) flight 007 was on its last leg from New York City to Seoul when it mistakenly flew into Russian airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula where top-secret Soviet military installations were located. Two fighters were launched, zeroed in on the KAL flight and tried to make contact with the pilot. Failing to receive a response, one of the fighters fired a heat-seeking missile, hitting the passenger plane, plunging it into the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crewmembers. The Kremlin claimed the jet was an American spy plane deep in Russian territory.
In response, President Ronald Reagan called the incident a "massacre" and issued a statement in which he declared that the Soviets had turned "against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere." The incident dramatically increased tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. So high were passions, it was not out of the question that the U.S. might fire nuclear missiles toward the Soviet Union in retaliation over the incident.
Three weeks later, on September 26, 1983, 44-year-old Lt. Col. Stanislav Yevgrafovivh Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces was on duty at Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker outside Moscow. His job was to monitor Oko, the Soviet Union's early-warning system for a nuclear attack and then pass along any alerts to his superiors. It was just after midnight when the alarm bells began sounding. One of the system's satellites had detected that the United States had launched ballistic missiles that were heading toward the Soviet Union. Electronic maps flashed; bells screamed; reports streamed in. A back-lit red screen flashed the word "launch." It appeared that the world was less than 30 minutes from nuclear war.
The satellite signal Petrov received in his bunker indicated that a single Minuteman missile had been launched and was headed toward the East. Four more missiles appeared to follow, according to satellite signals, and the protocol was clear: notify Soviet Air Defense headquarters in time for the military's general staff to consult with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. A retaliatory attack and nuclear holocaust would likely ensue.
Petrov, however, had a hunch - "a funny feeling in my gut," he would later recall - that the alarm ringing through the bunker was a false one. It was an intuition that was based on common sense: the alarm indicated that only five missiles were headed toward the Soviet Union. Had the U.S. actually been launching a nuclear attack, however, Petrov figured, it would be extensive - much more, certainly, than five missiles. Soviet ground radar, meanwhile, had failed to pick up corroborative evidence of incoming missiles - even after several minutes had elapsed. The larger matter, however, was that Petrov didn't fully trust the accuracy of the Soviet technology when it came to bomb-detection. He would later describe the alert system as "raw."Instead of immediately reporting to his superiors about the apparent missile launches by the American enemy, Petrov followed his instinct that was telling him that the signals could have been false alarms. This was a direct breach of protocols as the safest thing to do would have been to inform the higher authority immediately. However, it was this bold decision made by Petrov that may have saved the world from a nuclear holocaust as Soviet protocol said the military should respond to a nuclear attack with one of its own.
Convinced he was right about a false alarm, Petrov called the duty officer in the Soviet Army's headquarters and reported a warning system malfunction and more than likely the satellite in question had picked up the sun's reflection off the cloud tops and somehow interpreted that as a missile launch.
If he was wrong, atomic bombings of USSR would have happened within minutes. Twenty-three minutes later his intuitions were proved to be correct: American missiles apparently minutes away from impact seemed to vanish into the air and Soviet missile - armed and ready - remained in their silos
The U.S. had not attacked the Soviets. It was a false alarm. One that, had it not been treated as such, may have prompted a retaliatory nuclear attack on the U.S. and its NATO allies. Which would have then prompted a devastating global nuclear warfare.
It was for Petrov such a relief. He celebrated his decision with half a liter of vodka, fell into a sleep that lasted 28 hours, woke up and went back to work.
Petrov was initially praised for his cool head but later came under criticism and was made the scapegoat for the false alarm. This was because the incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the influential scientists who were responsible for it, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had to be punished.
He was chastised and eventually reassigned, in large part for not keeping a detailed log of his actions during the five minutes it took him to decide the alarm was false. He had also thwarted a protocol that was designed to take such a weighty decision out of the hands of humans. A computer, not an individual officer, would decide whether missiles were imminent and, thus, whether retaliatory action might be necessary.
Petrov's colleagues were professional soldiers with purely military training; they would being trained to follow instructions at all costs, likely have reported a missile strike had they been on shift at the time. Petrov, on the other hand, trusted his own intelligence, his own instincts, and his own gut. He made the brave decision to do nothing.In later years, Petrov sometimes said that he was simply "in the right place at the right time." Most of his comrades, he said, would probably have confirmed the approaching missiles rather than questioned the alerts from the computer.
In fact, according to Peter Anthony, a Danish filmmaker who directed "The Man Who Saved the World," a 2014 documentary on Petrov, he wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.
"Another officer was sick," Anthony said, "so Stanislav had to take over."
Petrov's story began attracting wide attention only in the late 1990s, after Gen. Yury Votintsev, the retired Soviet missile-defense chief, published a memoir describing Petrov's previously classified role in preventing a nuclear disaster. Once his role in preventing what could have been a nuclear holocaust was reported throughout the world, Petrov became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war."
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was born on Sept. 7, 1939, in Chernigovka, an air base north of Vladivostok. His mother was a nurse, and his father was an aviation engineer who had flown fighter planes during World War II. He was once shot down by the Japanese, resulting in a severe head injury and an admonition to his aviation-minded son: Never fly.
When his mother became pregnant with a second child, his parents decided they could not support a family of four, and enrolled Petrov in a military academy.
He studied long-distance radar systems at Kiev Higher Engineering Radio-Technical College of the Soviet Air Force, and after graduating in 1972 joined the Soviet Air Defense Forces. When he was stationed in the Far East, he met his wife, Raisa, who was working as a cinema operator at a military base in Kamchatka.When Raisa was diagnosed with brain cancer, Petrov retired early from the military to care for her during her chemo and radiation treatments. Raisa died in 1997.
Reliant almost entirely on a state pension, he was reduced at one point to growing potatoes outside his apartment building to feed his family. For a time, he made soup by boiling water with a leather belt for flavor.
Petrov died on May 19, 2017, at the age of 77 in his home in Fryazino, a center for scientific research outside Moscow. According to his son Dmitri. Petrov had been sick for six months with an "internal disease." He was living alone.
In addition to his son Dmitri, Petrov is survived a daughter, Yelena and two grandchildren.
Editor's Note: Here is a short video on Petrov's decision to call a missile attack on the Soviet Union by the United States a false alarm.