Over ten months ago, I wrote an article about an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that article, I discussed how then-Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov of the Soviet Navy may have literally saved the world from global thermonuclear war during the height of that crisis.
History has a way of repeating themes from time to time. And in an incident nearly 21 years later, another relatively senior military officer – again, one from the Soviet Union – may well have prevented global thermonuclear war a second time.
. . .
The time: late September 1983. Relations between the US and USSR were strained – probably at their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Andropov was the Soviet Premier; Reagan was POTUS. The US Reagan-era defense buildup was in high gear. Reagan’s rhetoric towards the Soviet Union was harsh; it was largely taken at face value by Soviet leadership. SDI (AKA “Star Wars”) had been announced. USAF and USN operations near the borders of the Soviet Union were at high levels, and were often intentionally provocative. Deployment of GLCMs and Pershing missiles – each capable of hitting targets in the Western USSR with nuclear warheads – in Europe were scheduled to begin within the next 2 months.
And roughly 3 weeks previously, a civilian Boeing 747 airliner (KAL 007) had strayed over Sakhalin Island. It had been intentionally shot down by Soviet air defense forces.
The bottom line: Soviet leadership was seriously tense. They may have in fact believed that the US was preparing for a surprise attack on their nation. Consequently, the Soviet military – including Soviet strategic nuclear forces – was in an enhanced state of readiness; some have termed it being on “hair-trigger alert”.
It was at this point – on 26 September 1983, to be precise – that the world as we knew it could have ended. One man’s level-headed actions prevented that possibility.
. . .
The man in question was Lt Col Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. On that date, he was the watch officer at Serpukhov-15 – the Soviet Air Defense Forces command post charged with monitoring the Soviet Union’s then-new ballistic missile warning satellite system, Oko.
Lt Col Petrov received an Oko alert noting the launch of a US Minuteman missile. The impact was projected to be within the USSR.
A short time later, he received a second alert. This second alert indicated the launch of up to 5 additional missiles.
Lt Col Petrov considered the situation. This didn’t make sense to him. A US nuclear first strike would be expected to launch literally hundreds of missiles, not 5 or 6. Launching that few missiles as an initial attack would be nonsensical; it would not destroy the Soviet Union’s land-based missiles and would thus allow full retaliation by the Soviet Union.
So Lt Col Petrov advised his superiors of the alert, and stressed that in his opinion it was a false alarm. He convinced them. (Some accounts indicate he sat on this information instead of notifying his superiors. I tend to disbelieve this, as Soviet procedures would have required him to advise superiors of a launch indication; he’d have been disciplined for failing to follow those procedures had he intentionally withheld information concerning a launch warning.)
Why was this critical? Because Soviet strategic doctrine at the time apparently endorsed “launch on warning” in order to prevent destruction of Soviet land-based missiles in the event of a US preemptive strike. The time window between Soviet detection of a US attack and the time retaliation would be ordered by Soviet leadership was thus quite short. And due to the strained relations between the US and USSR, people who knew Andropov well indicated years later that Andropov indeed thought the US was preparing to launch a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union in late 1983 – and was fully prepared to retaliate immediately if he was notified such an attack was inbound.
. . .
Lt Col Petrov’s assessment proved correct; the incident was in fact a false alarm. A previously-unknown combination of high clouds (reflecting sunlight) and the exact position of the particular Oko satellite raising the alarm in its high-angle orbit (the Oko constellation used Molniya orbits) combined to mimic a missile launch signature. The Soviets then developed a work-around procedure to screen out this type of false indication.
. . .
Lt Col Petrov was not commended for his actions during the incident. Instead, while he was held to have “acted properly”, he also received a minor reprimand for having “insufficienly documented his actions” during the incident in the command center’s duty log. As Petrov put it, this was because he had only two hands – and one was holding a telephone while the other was operating an intercom during the incident. He had no third hand with which to write. (smile)
Petrov chose to leave the Soviet military the next year, and went to work for the agency that had developed Oko. Some years later, he retired in order to care for his terminally ill wife.
The incident was not generally known in the West until it was disclosed in a senior Soviet general’s memoirs published in the 1990s. Afterwards, Petrov indeed received many accolades from foreign entities for his actions during the September 1983 incident. And in 2014, a Danish film about the incident was made. The film’s title? Appropriately, it was called, “The Man Who Saved the World”.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov passed away on May 19, 2017. His death received little public notice until September of last year.
Rest in peace, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. The world owes you much.
And though you were an adversary, you have my thanks – and my respect.
. . .
(Author’s Note: the Wikipedia articles concerning Petrov and the 1983 incident contain some additional information. Both appear to be decent articles; they’re linked above.)
