4. Soviet Warning System Detects Non-Existent Missiles
Surely the world would have learned from that near miss at NORAD in 1979. If a training tape can push the world to the brink of nuclear war then change must have been a must, right? Yet for all the mistakes humans are prone to make, we’re surprisingly bad at learning from them. In 1983 the world would once again be pushed to the brink of annihilation all over simple glitches and mistakes. Only this time it’d be the Soviet Union that nearly pushed the button.
In the 1980s under Reagan, the United States greatly increased its posture and force in regard to the Soviet Union. The United States conducted a number of operations to test Soviet radar and other capabilities. As a result, the Soviet Union was increasingly on edge, and with the economy declining, Soviet leaders knew they were losing their grip on society.
As a result, the Soviets were already on edge. On September 26th in 1983, when Stanislav Petrov was on duty at an early satellite command center/bunker outside of Moscow. Suddenly, the early warning systems started going off. Petrov saw that an intercontinental ballistic missile was en route from the United States to the USSR. Petrov could have sounded the alarm and possibly set off a nuclear war.
Except, the satellite systems had questionable reliability and there was only one missile inbound. Petrov shrugged it off. Shortly thereafter four more missiles showed up through the early warning system. To Petrov, this didn’t make sense. If the United States was going to launch an attack, they’d almost certainly do so with hundreds of missiles, not one or even five.
Using other detection methods, the Soviets figured out that it was indeed an error, caused by sunlight and high orbit clouds. As a result, a nuclear attack was averted by the sound training and judgment of officer Petrov.