Soviet officer’s decision headed off nuclear war
Lieutenant colonel’s death not reported for months
When alarms began to ring and a control panel flashed in front of Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel seated in a secret bunker south of Moscow, it appeared that the world was less than 30 minutes from nuclear war.
“The siren howled,” he later said, “but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.” His chair, he said, began to feel like “a hot frying pan.”
Petrov, an official with Russia’s earlywarning missile system, was charged with determining whether the United States had opened intercontinental fire on the Soviet Union. Just after midnight on Sept. 26, 1983, all signs seemed to point to yes.
The satellite signal Petrov received in his bunker indicated that a single Minuteman missile had been launched and was headed toward the East. Four more missiles appeared to follow, according to satellite signals, and the protocol was clear: notify Soviet Air Defense headquarters in time for the military’s general staff to consult with Yuri V. Andropov, the Soviet leader. A retaliatory attack, and nuclear holocaust, would likely ensue.
Yet Petrov, juggling a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, judged that the red alert was a false alarm. Soviet missiles, armed and ready, remained in their silos. And American missiles, apparently minutes from impact, seemed to vanish into the air.
“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov told The Washington Post in 1999. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”
While the “50-50” decision may have averted catastrophe, it ultimately destroyed the career of Petrov, who died May 19 at his home in Fryazino, a center for scientific research near Moscow. He was 77.
His death, much like the defining moment of his life, was largely unreported. It was announced by Karl Schumacher, a friend and political activist who said he heard the news from Petrov’s son, Dmitri, and that Petrov had been sick for the last six months.
The colonel’s brush with history came six months after President Ronald Reagan christened the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and just three weeks after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down, deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations even further.
When NATO held a military training exercise known as Able Archer 83 that November, Soviet officials interpreted Western troop movements as preparations for a preemptive strike. The country began readying its nuclear arsenal.
After the incident, Petrov became a pariah in the Soviet military, a scapegoat for what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity in the early-warning system’s software.
Instead of identifying a group of missiles, the software had spotted the sun’s reflection off the top of clouds.
Petrov said he was initially skeptical of the launch because only a handful of missiles had been fired and because Soviet ground-based radar had shown no evidence of an attack.