If you're breathing today, and you live in the United States (hell, even in the former Soviet Union) -- maybe you should take the time to read this post if you don't read any of the others. His 'inaction' could be the reason you're alive today.
There was obviously much tension between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. There's a lot of background leading up to this point which really set the tone for what could have been a costly blunder for the Soviets (and also the United States), but that only makes this whole thing that much more amazing in comparison.
On September 26th, 1983 Stanislav Petrov was on duty in charge of monitoring the satellite early warning network to preemptively notify his superiors of, well, impending doom in the form of missiles. If there was any sign of an attack, his job would have been to give the green-light for a counter-attack toward the United States on the scale of mutual assured destruction, meaning that [...]"a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender", which pretty much means that it would have been a fucked up melee free-for-all on a massive scale.
At 00:40, the bunker's computers reported that an intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the US.[3] Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a United States first-strike nuclear attack would hypothetically involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches to disable any Soviet means for a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system's reliability had been questioned in the past.[4] Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors[5] or not[3] after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union's land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union's response time to minutes.
Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system's indications a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarms had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error later corrected with cross-reference to a geostationary satellite.[6]
Petrov later indicated the influences in this decision included: that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so that five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; and that ground radars were still failing to pick up any corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay. [7]
Basically, millions of Americans would have been blown out of the ground all because of the Soviets' faulty equipment. He placed his ass on the line considering the pretty stressful position of having to make literal life or death decisions in his job role. He made the right one, and here I am alive and well, and able to tell you about him. So why haven't we heard of him before on a scale that seems comparatively appropriate? Despite all this, he was demoted and all of this was covered up because his superiors believed that it placed their whole system, and their effectiveness, in a bad light. In a story by Ian Thomas, Stanislav is quoted as saying, "The first reaction of my commander-general was ‘We will honour you’. But then a commission was launched into what had gone wrong. My commanders were blamed. And if the commanders were to blame, then the subordinates like me could not be innocent. It’s an old thing we have in Russia. The subordinate can not be cleverer than the boss, so there was no honour or credit for me". Mr. Petrov was neither rewarded nor directly punished for what he did (or didn't do that day), however; his once promising military career had come to an end and he retired a pensioner.
The question is: what do you think you would have done if, for instance, you were in a situation similar to his and all the livelihood of your nation depended on you? If things had been tense between you and the other country for decades and instantly you receive notice of warheads screaming towards you, would you retaliate instantaneously without much thought? Imagine the weight of the future generations on your shoulders in having to make a decision as monumental as this one:
Additional resources:
- Stanislav Petrov
- The After-effects of nuclear weapons (It might actually be better to be instantly vaporized than to initially survive.)
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