Soviet officer credited with averting a nuclear war
intercontinentalthe on-dutyUS towardsofficer followedthe ballistic commandMoscowOn a Sovietradar26 missiles protocol, Septemberscreen Union. showedcentre headingat Hadhe a outsidefive 1983, secret wouldthe from have set strike Stanislavin chain– possibly Petrov,the order triggeringthen for a 44-year-oldan a immediatethird world lieutenant counter-war. But colonel, Though feltit wasin his only gut weeksthat somethingsince Ronald was Reagan amiss. had denounced the USSR as an “evil empire”, and all the talk was of a US attack, it seemed to Petrov odd that Washington would start a nuclear war with only five missiles. So rather than alert the Kremlin, he waited – until it became clear that it was a false alarm. Yet he was not rewarded for saving the world from nuclear Armageddon. On the contrary, he was reprimanded for failing to record the incident in the logbook. No one even heard about it until 1998.
The son of a Second World War fighter pilot, Petrov was born in Vladivostok. He studied at a Soviet air force college, rose rapidly through ranks of the air defence forces, and began working on early warning systems in the early 1970s. With only about 25 minutes between launch and detonation, he and his fellow officers were supposed to report an alert without delay. But on that day, with the siren blaring and 200 subordinates watching him, “I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.” A subsequent investigation revealed that the supposed missile launch was actually sunlight reflecting off clouds. Petrov later said that the satellite-based system had been built in a rush, in response to the US developing one of its own: he had never quite trusted it.
The incident was hushed up, and the next year he retired, to become a military contractor. It was only when his then superior published a memoir, in 1998, that the near-miss was made public. A German activist named Karl Schumacher read about it, and convinced Petrov to travel to Germany to tell his story. After that, he received numerous awards, including the Dresden Peace Prize. Yet he insisted he was no hero – that he had only been doing his job – and seemed not to relish the publicity. Indeed, his death was only discovered when Schumacher recently rang to wish him a happy birthday, and was told that he had died in May.