Theman who saved the world –then got sacked for it
SERPUKHOV-15 was a secure compound 80 miles south of Moscow that housed the principal Soviet station designed to detect an attack on Russia by enemy missiles.
Via satellites, it monitored U.S. Minuteman ballistic missile silos in the American Mid-West, using infra-red sensors to detect the flare of a rocket should any be fired.
At 7pm on September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old computer specialist, arrived at the compound’s command centre to cover the shift of another officer who’d reported sick.
Petrov, with 26 years in the military, was deputy chief of the Department of Military Algorithms. His technical skills put him at the very peak of Soviet military expertise.
He was nearing the halfway point of his shift when suddenly, at 12.45am, a deafening klaxon rang out in the control room. Huge red letters flashed up on a monitor: ‘Launch . . . launch . . . launch.’
Petrov was stunned as all the operators and analysts stared at him, panic stricken, waiting for his orders. It was up to him to raise the alarm that the Soviet Union was under attack and must retaliate.
Yet from the screens he could see no signs indicating a rocket flare in Mid-West America.
He quickly decided that this was a false alarm, and was reporting this to the military command centre when the klaxon went off again.
Again, Petrov followed his instincts and reported a false alarm. But a few seconds later, the klaxon started up once more, and this time the message was the even more urgent: ‘Missile Attack!’ At least three U.S. missiles were heading towards the Soviet Union at 14,000mph, journey-time around 35 minutes.
Petrov later admitted to feeling ‘terrified’ and ‘very sweaty, as though I was sitting in a hot frying pan’.
The fate of the world was in his hands. His staff told him they could see no sign of a launch on their screens. But the computer analysts insisted there was no computer malfunction.
FACED with this conflicting advice, Petrov held on. He knew that the warning was being passed up the system to army chiefs of staff and the defence ministry and may even have reached Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader.
Those in charge of a nuclear retaliation would have been preparing to receive orders. Targets would be in the process of being sent out.
For now, though, everyone was looking to Petrov for a judgment. A false alarm, or a genuine missile attack?
He went through the options in his mind. If this was a pre-emptive missile strike by the Americans, he reasoned, it didn’t make sense that they had fired just three missiles. Then again, what if there had been some sort of foul-up in the American launch systems? Or a rogue individual had initiated the launch?
‘On the other hand,’ Petrov reminded himself, ‘our relations with the United States are very tense at the moment.’
Pressure for a decision intensified as two more launches were picked up by the satellite. Moscow was clamouring for information.
But Petrov continued to tell himself that it wasn’t real. He was sure that the computer system had failed. He had been involved in its installation and programming and knew its weaknesses.
By now, the commander-in-chief of Serpukhov-15 had arrived at Petrov’s side. They conferred and realised that, if the U.S. missiles were for real, they would now have been picked up by other Soviet tracking stations. But they were all silent.
It soon became clear that Petrov had been right. It was a false alarm. His conviction that a nuclear war would not start like this — and his lack of confidence in the early warning system he controlled — had been justified.
Later examination revealed what had happened. The infra-red sensors on one satellite had picked up the reflection of the sun on freak highaltitude clouds, and the supercomputer at Serpukhov-15 had confused this with the flare of a rocket.
It was extremely fortunate that Petrov was in charge that night. But the incident brought about the end of his career.
He had not followed protocols and sounded the alarm to launch Soviet missiles — even though it might have led to nuclear war.
Petrov was sacked and his pension was reduced.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the story of that fateful night came out and journalists found the former Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov living out a wretched life in a tower block in a Moscow suburb.
But sitting on the television set in his tiny apartment, there was a small statue of a globe resting inside an open hand which Petrov proudly pointed out to his visitors.
From Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, it was inscribed with the words: ‘To Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World.’