A Soviet officer who was dubbed “the man who saved the world” thanks to his cool head during the cold war, has died aged 77.
Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.
Soviet army protocol at the time would have been to immediately order a retaliatory strike and almost certainly “trigger a third world war,” says The Guardian.
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“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike,” Petrov 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 like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”
As the tension in the command center rose - “as many as 200 pairs of eyes were trained on Colonel Petrov,” says The New York Times - he made the decision to report the alert as a system malfunction.
“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he told The Washington Post. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”
It later emerged that the false alarm was the result of a satellite mistaking the reflection of the sun’s rays off the tops of clouds for a missile launch.
Petrov attributed his judgment to both his training and his intuition. He had been told that a nuclear first strike by the Americans would come in the form of an overwhelming onslaught.
“When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told the Post.
The incident occurred at the height of the cold war, just three weeks after the Soviet army had shot down a Korean passenger jet, killing all 269 people on board including a US congressman.
The then US president Ronald Reagan had recently called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” and Yuri Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was convinced the Americans were plotting a surprise nuclear attack.
But Petrov’s decision was based on an instinctual belief that the Soviets’ computer system was not up to scratch, saying that he was aware that it had been rushed into service in response to the United States’ introduction of a similar system.
“We are wiser than the computers,” he said in a 2010 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “We created them.”
Since the incident Petrov had largely faded into obscurity - at one point he had been reduced to subsistence farming - “when his role in averting nuclear Armageddon came to light in 1998 with the publication of the memoir of General Yuriy V. Votintsev, the retired commander of Soviet missile defense,” says the New York Times.
The book brought Petrov a measure of prominence. In 2006, he traveled to the United States to receive an award from the Association of World Citizens, and in 2013 he was awarded the Dresden Peace Prize. He was also the subject of a 2013 documentary-drama, “The Man Who Saved the World.”
Despite the grandiose moniker, Petrov never sought out the spotlight: “I was just at the right place at the right time,” he says in the film.
Petrov died on 19 May in Fryazino, a Moscow suburb, “where he lived alone on a state pension,” says The Guardian, but his death was only reported this week. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
