“I didn’t want to make a mistake.”
The
button in front of him pulsed, glowing red as if it had a wicked life of its
own. On it one word was written: “Start.”
As
in start World War III.
A
klaxon blared the alarm to Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel
in the Soviet Air Defence command. He was the duty officer in charge sitting in
a now less-than-easy chair in Serpukhov-15, a secret underground bunker located
100 miles south of Moscow. From this command center, the U.S.S.R. monitored
satellites positioned over the U.S. which would give it early-warning of
American missile launches. It was 15 minutes after midnight on September 26,
1983.
The
Cold War that year was colder than ever. Soviet leaders feared that President
Reagan wanted war. In March, he denounced the U.S.S.R as the “focus of evil in
the modern world…an evil empire.” The U.S. had begun placing Pershing II
nuclear missiles in Germany in response to the Soviet redeployment of its
nuclear missiles in Europe. The U.S. Air Force was routinely testing Soviet air
defenses with bomber missions that diverted away from the Russian border at the
last moment. Worse, on September 1, the Russian air force had shot down a
Korean Airlines 747 that had strayed over Russian territory, killing all 269
aboard.
“Every
second counted,” Petrov recalled. “My cozy armchair became a hot frying pan.”
The Sirens
Continued
Two
massive green electronic maps of the Soviet Union and the U.S. spanned the wall
in front of him. On it Petrov could see nine American military bases. “When the
“Start” button in front of me began blinking, I immediately looked at the map.
I could see on it that a military base on the east coast was also blinking—a
signal that a missile had been fired, aimed at us.”
Now—again
and again and again and again and again—five more warning lights flashed red.
The sirens continued to blast. The
screen showed that United States had launched five more Minuteman
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), each tipped with three to five
independently targetable nuclear warheads in the 300 to 500 kiloton range. (The
A-Bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of only 15 kilotons.)
The
screen flashed the words “Missile Attack.” Because multiple launches were now
seen, the computer automatically notified the general staff of the Russian
military. Petrov knew it would need his confirmation before contacting Yuri
Andropov, the General Secretary of the Central Committee the Communist Party.
Petrov
called a superior officer to ask his opinion. He was drunk and asked Petrov: “Can
it wait until tomorrow?”
Petrov
spent five agonizing minutes trying to figure out what was going on. ”I had a
funny feeling in my gut,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made
a decision, and that was it.”
No
Funnel-Shaped Tail
His
decision was to tell his superiors the warnings were a false alarm. They were.
There had been no U.S. missile launches. Petrov was experienced—and
cool-headed—enough to know that the U.S. would be unlikely to launch an attack
with so few missiles.
He
was also suspicious of what the computer was telling him. On the monitors in front of him, he saw no
visual confirmation of missile launches—the funnel-shaped tail of fire that
would trail behind the ascending ICBMs. Plus, the early warning system had just
been installed. Petrov didn’t trust it. As it turned out, atmospheric and
orbital conditions caused its sensors to interpret high altitude clouds as
missiles.
Had
Petrov authenticated the launches to his superiors, he says, “All our forces
would have been brought into combat readiness, with more than 11,000
missiles…complete overkill.”
Afterwards
his colleagues embraced him and justly called him a hero. Petrov swigged a pint
of vodka “as if it were a glass,” he says, and then slept for 28 straight hours.
As a reward, his comrades chipped in and got him a Russian-made portable TV.
Today
Petrov lives as a pensioner in Russia. Danish movie director Peter Anthony
interviewed him at length for a documentary about the incident. “I felt like I
was meeting Jesus when he answered the door, yet he was living like a street
person,” Anthony says. “He would make soup by boiling a leather belt in water
to give it flavor.”
MORAL: Think before you press the panic button.
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