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+--- Thread: Soviet officer who saved world in 1983 (Stanislav Petro dies) (/thread-4224.html)
Soviet officer who saved world in 1983 (Stanislav Petro dies) - C C - Sep 19, 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/18/soviet-officer-who-averted-cold-war-nuclear-disaster-dies-aged-77
EXCERPT: A Soviet officer whose cool head and quick thinking saved the world from nuclear war has died aged 77. 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 [...] 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....
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/stanislav-petrov-nuclear-war-dead.html
EXCERPT: [...] As the tension in the command center rose — as many as 200 pairs of eyes were trained on Colonel Petrov — he made the decision to report the alert as a system malfunction.
“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he told The Washington Post. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”
Colonel Petrov attributed his judgment to both his training and his intuition. He had been told that a nuclear first strike by the Americans would come in the form of an overwhelming onslaught.
“When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told The Post.
Moreover, Soviet ground-based radar installations — which search for missiles rising above the horizon — did not detect an attack, although they would not have done so for several minutes after launch.
Colonel Petrov was at first praised for his calm, but in an investigation that followed, he was asked why he had failed to record everything in his logbook. “Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand,” he replied.
He received a reprimand.
The false alarm was apparently set off when the satellite mistook the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds for a missile launch. The computer program that was supposed to filter out such information had to be rewritten. Colonel Petrov said the system had been rushed into service in response to the United States’ introduction of a similar system. He said he knew it was not 100 percent reliable.
“We are wiser than the computers,” he said in a 2010 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “We created them.”
[...] Colonel Petrov had largely faded into obscurity — at one point he had been reduced to growing potatoes to feed himself — when his role in averting nuclear Armageddon came to light in 1998 with the publication of the memoir of Gen. Yuriy V. Votintsev, the retired commander of Soviet missile defense. The book brought Colonel Petrov a measure of prominence. In 2006, he traveled to the United States to receive an award from the Association of World Citizens, and in 2013 he was awarded the Dresden Peace Prize. He was the subject of a 2014 hybrid documentary-drama, “The Man Who Saved the World"....
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Stanislav Petrov
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
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RE: Soviet officer who saved world in 1983 (Stanislav Petro dies) - elte - Sep 20, 2017
I got goosebumps just now contemplating it.