The Night Silence Saved the Night--September 1983, Under the Nuclear Shadow

The Night Silence Saved the Night--September 1983, Under the Nuclear Shadow
On September 26, 1983, Soviet military officer Major Stanislav Petrov was on a surveillance mission for the early warning system "Okoh" when he received an alert of a nuclear missile launch from the United States. The computer detected first one, then four, for a total of five ICBMs, a situation that would have led to an immediate decision to retaliate, according to common practice during the Cold War. Petrov, however, saw this as a false alarm. The number of launches was too few for a full-scale attack, and there was no response on ground radar. He judged it to be a false detection by a satellite, that is, a glitch in the system that misidentified the reflection of sunlight as a missile, and refrained from reporting the incident to higher authorities. This calm decision is said to have saved the world from the brink of nuclear war. In later years, the international community gave this unknown soldier the title of "the man who saved the world. It was the night that human reas
on prevailed over machines.