Humanity has rarely been as close to being wiped off the face of the Earth as on the morning of September 26, 1983. On that day, a satellite belonging to the Soviet defense system reported that American missiles had been launched against the USSR. Stanislav Petrov, the military officer in charge of the Serpukhov-15 bunker where the satellite was monitored, had the courage to defy the iron discipline imposed by the Russian army and decided to ignore the warning. Had he acted otherwise, the world as we know it would not exist. Here are the details of that event that could have ended life on the planet.
During the so-called “Cold War”, that period of tense peace the planet experienced after the end of the Second World War and until the fall of the “iron curtain”, humanity was on the brink of a nuclear war. The idea that a war can be avoided simply by showing the enemy that you have more nuclear bombs than he seems a real stupidity, especially when your opponent is doing exactly the same. However, and despite the fact that enough bombs and missiles were built to turn every enemy city into rubble several times over, the delicate balance managed to hold for about half a century.
The Autumn Equinox Incident
It is quite possible that there were several occasions when everything was about to go haywire. Surely more than once the system failed, or someone became paranoid enough to decide to press the red button, but for some reason it didn’t come to that. On September 26, 1983, at 00:14 Moscow time, one of those events took place. On the morning of that day, replacing the person normally in charge of that task, a mid-level officer named Stanislav Petrov was at the helm of the Serpukhov-15 bunker, one of the command centers that Soviet military intelligence used to coordinate the air defense of its territory.
Not even a quarter of an hour into that day, a Soviet satellite belonging to the OKO network raised the alarm: an American Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM, for Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) had taken off from the Malmstrom base in Montana (USA) and would reach Soviet territory in less than 20 minutes. To fully understand what that alert meant, it must be remembered that only three weeks earlier the Soviet Union had shot down a South Korean passenger plane (Korean Air Flight 007) that had, by mistake, invaded Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people on board. Among the victims were several American citizens, including Congressman Larry McDonald, a Democratic representative from Georgia.
Following the incident with the Korean plane, NATO began a military exercise called “Able Archer 83”, which the KGB had interpreted as preparation for a nuclear attack. In that tense atmosphere, Stanislav Petrov discovered what his defense system interpreted as an attack from the USA. However, this officer had enough composure to —avoiding the rules instilled during his training— not send the alert message to his superiors, who would very likely have launched a nuclear counterattack.
Petrov thought that if his enemy wanted to start a nuclear war, it would hardly do so by attacking with a single missile, and that it was only an error. But a few minutes later, the computers reported that four more missiles were heading toward that country. The officer, who knew the quirks of the Russian early warning satellite system OKO and how easily it could err, again considered it illogical to start an attack with only five missiles when one had an arsenal of thousands. The most effective approach would be —as hundreds of computer-run “war games” had shown— to send a large number of missiles against the Russian silos, so that the counterattack —if possible— would be as small as possible.
Fortunately for the world, Petrov decided to wait. Eventually it turned out to be a false alarm, caused by a rare astronomical conjunction between the Earth, the Sun, and the specific position of the OKO satellite. What later became known as the “Autumn Equinox Incident” brought humanity to the brink of catastrophe, but Petrov’s attitude prevented disaster. When later asked why he had not given the alert, he replied that he thought that “people don’t start a nuclear war with just five missiles.”
Obviously, his behavior was not what his superiors expected, and although he had almost certainly prevented a nuclear war, and his superior assured him he would be honored for it, the truth is that he was no longer considered reliable and a secret investigation was opened. Petrov was accused of a minor bureaucratic offense —improperly completing forms— and was assigned to tasks of minor responsibility, until he voluntarily retired a few months later. The investigation revealed that the flashes detected by OKO were nothing more than reflections of the sun on clouds, mistakenly interpreted by the alert system’s software as missile engines igniting.
The software was rewritten, and in 1984 the Soviets placed a new satellite over American territory that provided extra data to the OKO system. No other events like these are known, or at least they have not been widely publicized, but it is quite likely they occurred. The “Autumn Equinox Incident”, had it not been for the chance presence of Stanislav Petrov in the Serpukhov-15 bunker, could have triggered a nuclear war, which is why this military officer is known as “The Man Who Saved the World”.
Stanislav Petrov died on May 19, 2017, at the age of 77, of hypostatic pneumonia. His opinion about what happened was very simple. As he said in an interview for the documentary about his life, titled “The Man Who Saved the World”: “I was just doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that’s all. My wife didn’t know anything about it for 10 years. ‘What did you do?’, she asked me later. ‘Nothing. I didn’t do anything.’”
You can learn more about Stanislav Petrov on Wikipedia.
