Stanislav Petrov, who averted nuclear war, dies

Stanislav Petrov, a former Soviet military officer known in the West as “the man who saved the world’’ for his role in averting a nuclear war over a false missile warning at the height of the Cold War, has died at 77.

Petrov’s German friend, Karl Schumacher, said Tuesday that he died on May 19. Schumacher called Petrov earlier this month to wish him a happy birthday, but was told by Petrov’s son Dmitry that his father had died. The Russian state Zvezda TV station only reported the death on Tuesday.

Petrov was on night duty at the Soviet military’s early warning facility outside Moscow on Sept. 26, 1983, when an alarm went off, signalling the launch of several U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 44-year-old lieutenant colonel had to quickly determine whether the attack was real. He chose to consider it a false alarm, which it was.

The incident was particularly harrowing as it happened at one of the tensest periods of the Cold War when the Soviet Union appeared to genuinely fear a surprise U.S. nuclear attack.

A few weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a passenger plane flying to South Korea from the U.S., suspecting it of spying, killing all 269 people aboard. The United States, after a series of provocative military manoeuvrs, was preparing for a major NATO exercise that simulated preparations for a nuclear attack.

In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Petrov recalled the excruciating moments at the secret Serpukhov-15 control centre when the fate of the world was in his hands.

“I realized that I had to make some kind of decision, and I was only 50/50,’’ Petrov told the AP.

The responsibility was enormous.

If he had judged it a real launch, the top Soviet military brass and the Kremlin would have had no time for extra analysis in a few minutes left before the incoming nuclear-tipped missiles hit Soviet territory. They would have likely ordered a retaliatory strike, triggering a nuclear war.