Happy Stanislav Petrov day. Official or not, I’m going to celebrate it.
On September 25, 1983 the officer on duty couldn’t make it for some reason and was replaced by another officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. 44-year old Stanislav arrived in the bunker, took the command and the shift started normally. Everything was routine, until the quiet flow of the shift was suddenly interrupted.
About forty minutes after midnight, when it was late afternoon in the States, sirens in the bunker howled, warning lights blazed. Cosmos-1382, an Oko satellite, detected a launch of a Minuteman nuclear missile from Malmstrom AirForce Base in Montana, the main American ICBM field. Americans have launched an attack on the Soviet Union. Everyone in the room felt the gravity of the situation. On a large US map on the wall a light turned on showing the location of the missile launch. A “Start” button flashed before Stanislav. He had less than 10 minutes to decide the fate of the world. Military instructions that he remembered all too well said he needs to press it and send a confirmation to the Defence Minister of the USSR. But something didn’t look right. “Who would start a nuclear war with only one missile?” thought Stanislav Petrov. That must have been a reading error, a false positive, a bug somewhere in the notification system. As a software engineer he knew that no system is immune to errors.
But Petrov hesitated, knowing that Soviet response would be to launch a devastating retaliation attack on the United States. Thousands of missiles from launch-pads in Siberia, from nuclear submarines in the Pacific Ocean would slowly raise in flames and start the unstoppable journey to their targets in the United States and in Europe, only to bring death and destruction on the titanic scale twenty minutes later.
Weighting all information he had, Stanislav decided to ignore the alarm.
Get to the nearest post office and send him a telegram. Or order a bouquet of flowers online for him. Or send him a photo of your children and thank him that they are still alive. Look outside at the blue sky and thank him that it’s not covered with impenetrable layer of radioactive dust and clouds. Walk outside and thank him that you can do it without a radiation protection suit.
Wow. I had no idea this happened. Perhaps if I was a better student in High School I might have learnt at thing or two.
BTW: You have a beautiful family! I post stuff of my kids and wife off to the side of my sight…but as of yet I have not had the courage to post my own mug. Perhaps I’ll be secure enough next week.
I don’t think ANYONE knew about this until long after it happened.
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