An elderly Russian man was quietly laid to rest outside Moscow last spring. No crowd mourned him. No news articles reported his passing. Yet, if you’re age 36 or older, you are alive to read this because of him. And you’ve never even heard his name.
This is what happened the night Stanislav Petrov saved the world.
It all started in the late 1970s. The United States and the Soviet Union faced off in the Cold War. President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy vacillated between sometimes talking tough, sometimes going out of its way to accommodate the Soviets. Moscow smelled weakness.
So the Soviets deployed their new SS-20 nuclear missiles. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) upped the ante by announcing it would deploy its powerful Pershing II missiles in Western Europe by 1983 in response.
Suddenly, it felt like we were living in Armageddon’s shadow. If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember massive anti-nuclear war rallies in the northeast U.S. and Europe, some attracting hundreds of thousands of protestors. A TV movie about a post-nuclear attack called The Day After got huge ratings. Rock music songs that played on nuclear fears such as The Final Countdown, It’s A Mistake, and 99 Red Balloons were big hits. People were on edge.
Which brings us to September 1983. Early that month, the USSR shot down an unarmed Korean Air Lines jetliner over Soviet airspace, killing all 239 people onboard—including an American congressman from Georgia. East-West relations were indeed tense.
At that precise moment Stanislav Petrov unknowingly entered the world stage.
A 44 year-old Air Force lieutenant colonel and father of two, he served in the Soviet’s prestigious Air Defense Forces. He was part of the elite team that monitored the Russians’ satellites which, in turn, kept an eye out for nuclear missile launches by the U.S. via a spiffy new state-of-the-art computerized system.
Petrov worked the overnight shift. Early on the morning of September 26, the unthinkable happened. “The siren howled,” he recalled in a 2013 interview. “I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, backlit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.”
But something wasn’t right. The system showed five missiles heading for the Soviet Union. Petrov’s training had indicated that if a nuclear strike came, dozens of warheads would rain down on Russia, not just five.
What was going on? Time wasn’t on Petrov’s side. Every minute he spent trying to figure it out was a minute weapons might be speeding toward his sleeping homeland.
And nobody in the entire Soviet Union was aware of it--except Stanislov Petrov. His standing order was to immediately notify the Kremlin’s big brass in such an emergency. His gut instinct told him to wait. As he was making up his mind, the word “launch” flashed in his face.
In the end, he didn’t notify his superiors as protocol required. Had he done so, they likely would have ordered a massive retaliatory strike on the United States, very probably ending life as we know it. Instead, he waited. “Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened,” he said. “If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.”
It was the closest the world had come to an actual nuclear conflict since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
It turned out Petrov’s instinct was right. The computer system had malfunctioned. At first his superiors were pleased with his coolness amid the ultimate crisis. But the Soviets were world-class bureaucrats, and he was later reprimanded for not filling out the required paperwork while the crisis was underway. “I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand (for filling out forms),” he said.
Petrov eventually left the military to work for the very research institute that designed the faulty monitoring system. He suffered a mental breakdown due to the emotional trauma he had experienced, recovered, and eventually retired to tend to his wife during her final battle with cancer.
He was living alone when he died quietly at age 77 last May 19, such an obscure figure that news of his passing wasn’t learned until just a few weeks ago.
“They were lucky it was me on shift that night,” Stanislav Petrov once said. That’s putting it mildly.        
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