The Soviet officer who averted a nuclear war

In the early hours of Sept. 26, 1983, Soviet missile defense officer Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a bunker near Moscow when alarm bells started to sound. Computers warned Lieut. Col. Petrov that five nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base toward the U.S.S.R. He now had a choice: Alert his superiors, who would likely order an immediate retaliatory nuclear strike, or sit tight and hope it was a false alarm. Doubting the reliability of the antimissile system, and reasoning that a genuine U.S. attack would involve far more than five missiles, Petrov opted to do nothing. It was the right call. He later discovered that a Soviet early-warning satellite had mistaken the sun’s reflection off the top of some clouds for a missile launch. “We are wiser than computers,” Petrov said in 2010. “We created them.”

Born on an air base north of Vladivostok, Petrov was advised by his father— a fighter pilot in World War II—to “never fly,” said The Washington Post. Instead, he studied long-distance radar systems after joining the Soviet Air Defense Forces, and rose quickly through the ranks. Following the false alarm, a military investigation “chastised and eventually reassigned Petrov,” blasting him for not keeping a detailed log during the incident. “His hands were full, he said.”

Petrov’s story “did not become widely known” until his former superior published his memoirs in 1998, said The Guardian (U.K.). He subsequently received honors from peace organizations around the world, and became the subject of a 2013 documentary, The Man Who Saved the World. But Petrov dismissed those who called him a hero, saying he was simply “in the right place at the right time.”