Stanislav Petrov was a largely unsung hero of the cold war, whose calm common sense saved the world from nuclear war. In 1983, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet air defence forces and duty officer at Serpukhov-15, a secret command centre outside Moscow that monitored Soviet early warning satellites orbiting over the US. Early in the morning of 26 September, alarms went off and computers sent signals that a US Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched from an American base. A few seconds later they seemed to detect that four more missiles had been launched.
“We were in a state of shock,” Petrov recalled. “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’” It was his job to tell his superiors, who would report to the general staff of the Soviet military. They would then consult the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, about launching a counterattack. Petrov’s computer systems said the reliability of the satellites’ information was at the “highest” level. Only 25 minutes would pass between the missiles’ launch and their detonation.
“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike,” he told the BBC in 2013. “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 as if I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”
He decided to report the alert as a system malfunction. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he told the Washington Post in 1999. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”
His misgivings proved well founded. Although they would not have registered activity until several minutes after any launch, Soviet ground-based radar installations that can track missiles rising above the horizon did not detect an attack. The false alarm was apparently caused by the satellite mistaking the sun’s reflection off the tops of high-altitude clouds for a missile launch.
The incident happened at a particularly critical period during the cold war. The US president, Ronald Reagan, had denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and was rapidly enhancing the US nuclear arsenal. Pershing II medium-range missiles were about to be installed in western Europe, shortening the time between nuclear launch and Soviet territory.
Since mid-February 1981 the US had been testing Soviet radar and satellite vulnerabilities with a series of near-penetrations of Soviet territory. Clandestine naval operations stealthily accessed waters near the Barents, Norwegian, Black and Baltic seas, demonstrating how close Nato ships could get to critical Soviet bases. US bombers flew directly towards Soviet airspace, peeling off only at the last moment, sometimes several times a week.
The Soviet leadership feared Washington was preparing an all-out sneak attack. In early September 1983 a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air commercial flight after it crossed into Soviet airspace, believing it was a spy plane. All those on board were killed.
In this heightened atmosphere, Petrov’s response to the computers’ warning of missile launches was remarkably cool-headed. At first he was praised for his action, but after an investigation was reprimanded for failing to record everything properly in the log book. Asked why he had failed in this respect, he replied: “Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand.”
Petrov was born near Vladivostok in the Soviet far east. His father had been a second world war fighter pilot. His mother was a nurse. After studying at the Kiev higher engineering radio-technical college of the Soviet air force, he joined the air defence forces. Gaining quick promotion, he was assigned to the early warning system when it began in the early 1970s.
He retired from the military in 1984 and became a senior engineer at the research institute that had created the early warning system. His role in averting all-out nuclear war received prominence only in 1998, when Col Gen Yury Votintsev, the retired commander of Soviet missile defence, mentioned him in his memoirs.
In 2006 Petrov went to New York to receive an award from the Association of World Citizens. In 2013 he won the Dresden peace prize and in 2014 Jakob Staberg, a film producer, made a documentary-drama, The Man Who Saved the World, about him.
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