The Man Who Saved the World Has Died

I had never heard of Stanislav Petrov before reading his obituary in my Sunday LA Times, nor had I heard of the Danish documentary that bares his international nickname as the title: "The Man Who Saved the World."

Stanislav was a Soviet military intelligence agent working at a super secret base when, on September 26th, 1983, his alarms starting going off. The sirens were blaring as they announced that the US had fired a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union. Stanislav was incredulous.

His superiors arrived quickly and inquired just WTF was going on. Another alarm sounded, saying a second launch had taken place. Petrov and his superiors had about three minutes to decide if their machines were working properly or if they were malfunctioning and sending incorrect notices.

They needed to send to Moscow immediately whether or not the counter-strikes needed to be launched. This, obviously, would have been catastrophic and, obviously, didn't happen.

What did happen?

Well, with such trigger-happy sets of leaders in the two antagonist states multiple checks and balances had been set up to gain as much information in the three minutes as possible as to hopefully ward off false-positives.

Petrov noticed that while one set of alarms were going off, his ground data---seismic sensors in the general vicinity of supposed launch sites---were showing no such changes expected to be seen during launches. He told his superiors that no counter-strikes were needed, the machines were giving false positives.

He used the data at hand and made a judgement. If wrong, he would have been dead, either by nuclear strike, nuclear fallout, or bullet to the head before either of the first two claimed him. If right, catastrophe would have been diverted.

The event was never made public and was basically forgotten until after the fall of the USSR when that same unsupportive superior made the story public. Stanislav himself claimed he had mostly forgotten the tense moments until the story was told to the world-at-large.

Eventually he was feted as a hero and given the nickname that was used as the title of that Danish documentary: The Man Who Saved the World.

He passed away May 19th at his home in Moscow and the news of it went unrecognized until just recently.

What I didn't know about was the immediate and exact history of the tension of Fall '83: On 9/1, just over three weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Airlines plane that drifted too close to their airspace, killing all of the over 200 passengers, including a US congressperson.

Can you imagine that same scenario today?