The World Survived 1983 Without a Nuclear Holocaust Thanks to a Little-Known Soviet Officer
Few know of Stanislav Petrov, despite the fact that he saved the world from a nuclear holocaust. If not for him, most of us would not be alive today. Early in the morning of September 26th, 1983, Soviet early warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the US. Computer readouts confirmed the warning, and advised that several American missiles had been launched. Soviet protocol for such a scenario called for an immediate response by launching their own nukes in retaliation. Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer in charge, and his job was to immediately alert Soviet leaders to launch their own missiles. As he put it in an interview decades later: “I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it“.
At the time, Cold War tensions were particularly high. Soviet leaders feared American president Ronald Reagan. They also suspected that a massive NATO training exercise known as Able Archer, that was taking place at the time, might be a ruse, to conceal preparations for a surprise attack against the Warsaw Pact. In short, it was a bad time for nuclear attack warnings to go off in the USSR. By nuclear warfare logic, the protocols of immediately launching your missiles upon receipt of a warning that the enemy had launched their nukes made sense on “use it or lose it” grounds. Given the short window – under half an hour – between missile launch detection and impact, the side that failed to immediately launch its own missiles risked having them destroyed in their silos.