The Night Silence Saved the Night--Stanislav Petrov and the Nuclear Crossroads, September 1983

The Night Silence Saved the Night--Stanislav Petrov and the Nuclear Crossroads, September 1983
On September 26, 1983, Soviet military officer Major Stanislav Petrov would make a pivotal choice in the history of mankind. On that day, the Soviet early warning system "Okoh," on which he was serving, issued a warning that nuclear missiles had been launched from the United States toward the Soviet Union. The system detected that five ICBMs had been launched, first one and then four. This was a situation that would normally have provoked a nuclear retaliation by the Soviet Union. This was because the nuclear deterrence strategy during the Cold War was based on the belief that an immediate counterattack against the first strike by the enemy would be catastrophic.

However, Major Petrov intuitively knew that this alarm was wrong. In the event of all-out nuclear warfare, five missiles was unrealistic, and ground radar had not detected any missiles in the air. In addition, the fact that the alarm was so "perfect" made him suspect a mechanical malfunction. Thus, he did not immediately report it to his superiors, avoiding a decision that could have triggered nuclear retaliation. As it turned out, the alert was due to a system misidentification, in which a satellite mistakenly identified a sunlight reflection as an American missile launch.

It is said that this decision allowed Petrov to avoid triggering a nuclear war and saved mankind from the brink of destruction. Since the 2000s, the incident has become internationally known and Petrov has been hailed as "the man who saved the world. His prudence and human judgment are still talked about to this day as an event that symbolizes the overconfidence in machines and the perils of the Cold War military system.