If the course of that tense evening of 1983 had played out a little differently, perhaps September 25th was the day the survivors celebrated the 35th anniversary of the beginning of the Third World War – if ever. who survived. 6 a.m. EST that day marked the moment when the choice of one man saved the world.
On September 26, 1983 , at midnight, alarm bells wailed loudly throughout the Serpukhov-5 nuclear facility located in a secret bunker south of Moscow. The red screen across the glass-covered office of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, which was usually blank, was now flashing a disturbing text: “Start up” . From the information obtained, the attack detection computer system, Oko, warned that the US side had just launched an intercontinental missile at the Soviet Union. It is estimated that the missile will hit the target within 12 minutes.
At that warning, Petrov, hands shaking, picked up the phone and called his superiors of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. He confirmed this was a false alarm . He could not find a reason why the US only launched one missile, perhaps there was a fault in the early warning system, which a software engineer like Petrov did not fully believe. He had just put the phone down on the shelf when the system sent out a second alarm, and then three more. So there are five missiles flying in a curved trajectory towards the target of the Soviet Union. At this time, the warning system was 100% sure that this was an attack from the US.
Petrov’s procrastination saved us from World War 3.
“I felt an insecurity welling up inside of me,” Petrov told a Washington Post reporter. If the attack is real, every minute counts. Petrov’s mission was to transmit a warning signal about the chain of command, providing information to those in authority who decided to launch a response salvo before the American missile destroyed the Soviet counter-attack ability.
But he hesitated. He knew that the system gave the warning too quickly to give the necessary tests, he did not trust it. And until then, the ground radar system, which should have sounded the siren as soon as the American missile crossed the atmosphere, was silent again, the silence continued for several minutes. when the launch alert is issued. There was still an inconsistency in the number of missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. Only 5 out of about 1000 missiles owned by the US were launched, too few compared to what the Soviet-Soviet military knew. They believe that the first wave of attacks will always be the overwhelming blow because there is no force left with enough strength to survive the second wave.
The alarm still rang, the attack warning continued to flash on the screen, and Lieutenant Petrov picked up the phone again to confirm the false alarm with his superiors. But that was also when his beliefs were no longer certain.
Years later, in an interview with a BBC reporter, he said: “There was a flash in my mind that this was really an attack on us.” The 15 minutes of waiting that followed was a painful time in his heart. But in the end, nothing happened. Perhaps just one more small step, and the world will plunge into a great nuclear war, no one but those directly receiving the chain of information from Petrov knew this truth until 1998.
Petrov was right to deny his belief in computer systems. The above false warnings were explained by the satellite system that mistook the sun’s rays reflected from a high-flying cloud over North Dakota as a light trail created by a rocket. And to overcome this kind of mistake, the system has added the function of automatically matching with data viewed from another angle collected by geostationary satellites.
At that time, Petrov, who risked everything to save millions and billions of lives, was not honored or punished at all. He was secretly transferred to another position, and was retired early in 1984. A few years later, his wife died of cancer. Petrov’s bold decision made him known worldwide when the story was published in 1998. But instead of doing foreign tours and giving interviews, he decided to live spent the rest of his life in a small apartment in Moscow on a meager pension. He passed away in 2017.