The world might have descended into nuclear catastrophe thirty-one years ago today, September 26, 1983, had someone other than Stanislav Petrov been in charge of the Soviet early-warning system at a key moment. Via BillMoyers.com:
On this date in 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer in the command center for the USSR’s early warning system when Russian satellites twice detected the launch of five ICBMs from the US. Had Petrov followed protocol and reported the “attack,” Moscow might have retaliated, bringing about a global nuclear war. But he didn’t trust the newly-installed system, and doubted a nuclear strike would begin with only handful of missiles. So, without any additional information, Petrov decided it was a false alarm and kept it to himself. The incident came to light after the fall of the USSR.
This was only three weeks after a Soviet plan shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, so there was already some tension.
Via Wikipedia:
Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system’s indication a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites’ Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.
Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included: that he was informed a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay. However in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. His colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile strike if they had been on his shift.
His superiors were not too happy with the fact that he discovered flaws in the early warning system, and he suffered for it:
He received no reward. According to Petrov, 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 reassigned to a less sensitive post, took early retirement (although he emphasizes that he was not “forced out” of the army, as is sometimes claimed by Western sources), and suffered a nervous breakdown.
He did receive a “World Citizen Award,” with a $1,000 honorarium, from the Association of World Citizens in 2004, and he was honored at the United Nations in 2006. This was followed in 2013 by the Dresden Prize, which included €25,000 (about $32,000). Around the time he appeared at the UN, the Russian government sort of threw him under the bus (PDF file), stating that “even if one officer ‘had reported a satellite signal about an incoming nuclear missile’, the nuclear war would have never started.”
Petrov is still around, presumably living in Russia somewhere. He’s uncertain that he should be considered a hero:
Petrov has said he does not know that he should regard himself as a hero for what he did that day. In an interview for the documentary film The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World, Petrov says, “All that happened didn’t matter to me—it was my job. I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that’s all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. ‘So what did you do?’ she asked me. ‘I did nothing.'”
If you ask me, sometimes doing nothing is the courageous thing to do.
