The New York Times obituary for Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet military officer to whom Americans over the age of 35 may owe their lives. On September 26, 1983, he was on duty at a command center outside Moscow monitoring satellites designed to detect missile launches from American soil. Early in the morning the system suddenly began indicating that five intercontinental ballistic missiles had been fired from an American base and would land in Russia within about 25 minutes. The obituary describes protocol:
Colonel Petrov was at a pivotal point in the decision-making chain. His superiors at the warning-system headquarters reported to the general staff of the Soviet military, which would consult with Mr. Andropov on launching a retaliatory attack.
It's not known what Andropov and his top military advisers would have done. They did not receive news of the alert until after the missiles would have reached their targets. For around five minutes, Petrov deliberated himself before concluding that the blinking-red military system was likely an error. He decided to report only "a system malfunction." Within twenty minutes, when nothing happened, what he later described as his "gut feeling" was confirmed. His training had taught him to expect something different--an all-out attack designed to knock out as much of the Soviet's response capability as possible, so that the US could survive an expected but diminished retaliatory strike. Just five missiles therefore aroused his suspicion. Moreover, the early-warning system was relatively new, and he didn't entirely trust it. An investigation later determined that the false alarm had been triggered by the sun's reflection off the tops of clouds. With either deliberate or unconscious understatement, the obituary notes that "[t]he computer program that was supposed to filter out such information had to be rewritten."
Petrov received a reprimand for inadequate entries in his log book that morning. He retired from military service the next year and worked as an engineer until taking a small pension in the 1990s to care for his wife, who had cancer. She died in 1997. His part in avoiding catastrophe in 1983 was not revealed until 1998, when a retired Soviet military commander published a memoir. Petrov then achieved a certain renown, and was the subject of a 2014 film, The Man Who Saved the World, but he spurned publicity and lived out his days in what photographs suggest was a somewhat shabby apartment in a Moscow suburb (the above photo was taken in 2015 and accompanies an NPR obituary). His death last May was not reported in Russia and became widely known only recently, when western contacts, having failed in efforts to communicate with him, finally reached his son.
The title of the film is arguably windy, since Andropov, who knew as much or more than Petrov, may well have exhibited similar restraint. On the other hand, tensions were high, President Reagan was regularly referring to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire," and only three weeks earlier the Soviets had shot down a Korean commercial airliner that had strayed into their airspace, killing all 269 people on board. Of the many chilling what-ifs that arise, one concerns the degree to which we can trust our current president to act sensibly in any crisis. If the fate of the earth depended on either Trump or a Russian chosen at random from a Moscow directory exercising restraint, I wouldn't hesitate to call for the directory.
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