Nuke attack or false alarm? Soviet soldier’s call saved the world
In the early hours of September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a Soviet early warning centre near Moscow when an alarm sounded on his computer, warning of the launch of a US intercontinental ballistic missile.
Petrov, speaking in 2013, recalled: “The siren howled but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.”
The system told him that the level of reliability of that alert was “highest”. There could be no doubt. America had launched a missile.
Petrov’s job was to register any missile strikes and to report them to the Soviet military and political leadership. In the political climate of 1983, a retaliatory strike would have been almost certain.
“A minute later, the siren went off again. A second missile had been launched. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike’.”
The very clear protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. But Petrov decided not to report the alerts to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.
That was a clear breach of his instructions and a dereliction of duty.
He said: “I had all the data. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it. There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time; that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay.
“All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”
There was a back-up, a group of satellite radar operators, and they told him that their equipment had registered no missiles.
But the rules said that the decision had to be based on computer readouts. And that decision rested with him, the duty officer.
What made him suspicious about what he was seeing on screen was just how strong and clear that alert was. He said: “There were 28 or 29 security levels. After the target was identified, it had to pass all of those ‘checkpoints’. I was not quite sure it was possible, under those circumstances.”
Petrov called the duty officer in the Soviet army’s headquarters and reported a system malfunction.
If he was wrong, the first nuclear explosions would have happened just minutes later. “Twenty-three minutes later I realised nothing had happened,” said Petrov. “If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.”
It later emerged the system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile in flight.
Despite having saved the world from nuclear war, Petrov received an official reprimand – not for what he did but for mistakes in the official logbook.
He kept quiet for a decade, feeling it was embarrassing to the authorities that the system had failed in that way. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he told his terrifying story.
Petrov, who won international awards for his decision, died in 2017 of pneumonia. He was 77.