The World Survived Because a Fluke of Fate Placed the Right Man in the Right Place at the Right Time
The warning made it to the Soviet watch officer, whose job was to sound the alarm up the chain. Had that happened, it would almost certainly would have led to a decision to launch Soviet missiles. Luckily, by sheer accident of fate, the Soviet watch commander that night was Stanislav Petrov. A signal processing engineer, Petrov was not the typical watch officer, and was not supposed to be at that post at that time. He had subbed in that night for a sick colleague. Unlike the typical watch officer, Petrov had unique knowledge of the Soviet nuclear attack warning’s system’s quirks. An accidental watch officer, he was, literally, the right man at the right place at the right time to save the world from nuclear annihilation. When he received an alarm that the US had launched nukes, Petrov declined to alert his superiors.
As he described it years later: “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it … A minute later the siren went off again. The second missile was launched. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike’“. Petrov trusted his instincts – and the advise of radar operators who told him they registered no missiles – and dismissed the alert as a false alarm. Instead, he called the duty officer at Red Army headquarters, and reported a system malfunction. If he was wrong, mushroom clouds would have erupted all around the USSR within minutes. They did not. A few days later, Petrov received an official reprimand – not for what he did that night, but for mistakes in the logbook.