[sparky@home]

I don’t know how many people know Col. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, whose cool head and quick thinking probably saved the world from a nuclear war.

Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.

Red Army protocol would have been to order a retaliatory strike, but Petrov – then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel – ignored the warning, relying on a “gut instinct” that told him it was a false alert.

“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” he told the BBC’s Russian Service in 2013. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders.”

Instead of triggering a third world war, Petrov called in a malfunction in the early warning system. But even as he did so, he later admitted, he was not entirely sure he was doing the right thing.

“Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief,” he said.

It later emerged that the false alarm was the result of a satellite mistaking the reflection of the sun’s rays off the tops of clouds for a missile launch.
What should be remembered is that the soviets had shot down a Korean Airlines plane killing which had drifted into their air space, killing all 269 passengers, on Sept 1st of that year. Things could have definitely gone south, if the Soviet union had reacted.

He was also the subject of a 2013 documentary film entitled The Man who Saved the World, a name which he deserves rightfully.

He died 19th May 2017.

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