The Legend of Stanislav Petrov
How a Russian commander ignored his own orders and saved the world
September 26, 1983. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller is still on the charts, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book tops the bestseller lists, and NBC’s Saturday Night Live is showing promise with newly-energized material. In British Columbia, labour unrest is paving the way for the province-wide “Solidarity Strike.” In Washington, president Ronald Reagan is high in the saddle and musing publicly about the “Strategic Defence Initiative,” a proposed Rube Goldberg–like missile defense system in outer space the press has taken to calling “Star Wars.”
Few people know how close the world came to nuclear war that day. Even fewer know about the one person who very likely saved humanity from catastrophe.
On September 5th, a Korean airlines jet with many Americans aboard disappeared over Sakhalin, a Soviet-occupied island just north of Japan. Reagan responded with his memorable description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." As the rhetoric ratcheted up on both sides, the KGB warned its Western operatives to prepare for possible nuclear war.
It’s now thought that throughout 1983 the Kremlin believed the United States and its NATO allies were planning a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
With the US-led NATO organizing a military exercise that centered on using tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, these fears weren’t entirely off base. Reagan’s Star Wars speech earlier that year gave every indication the US/Soviet antiballistic missile treaty was heading for history’s dustbin. It seemed his administration had little or no concern about the fallout – literally and figuratively – from what many scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain regarded as a dangerously destabilizing extension of the cold war into space.
The doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) had seemingly kept the peace for decades. The US and Russia both pursued a cold war policy of responding to the first signs of a nuclear attack by firing off most of their inventory of atomic weapons – which would certainly spell the end for western civilization, if not the human species. Nuclear deterrence worked: US and Soviet leaders had a thermonuclear gun to each other’s head. But the times had changed. The oval office was now occupied by a former film actor who once co-starred with a chimpanzee, a man who had a gig during the McCarthy era as Hollywood’s most prominent redbaiter, testifying of colleagues suspected of communist sympathies.
Throughout the cold war, US officials inflated intelligence estimates of a “missile gap” between the US and USSR - and the former governor of Sacremento was not given to measured reflection about a real-world threat from the Soviet Union. He speculated openly about trees causing pollution and an impending biblical Apocalypse. Within the Kremlin, the politburo’s aging cold warriors may well have debated whether or not they should shoot first before this brylcreemed ham actor had a chance.
In this overheated climate, close calls involving escalating nuclear conflict were inevitable. How close, we only came to know in retrospect, after the Russian 1998 declassification of an incident fifteen years earlier.
“God’s own joke out of outer space”
Deep inside Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker somewhere in the Soviet Union, Soviet officers regularly monitored the regime’s early-warning satellites. On September 26, 1983, Serpukhov-15 rotated its officers, putting Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov in charge of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) command and control post. Petrov was not the regular duty officer at the bunker. A 2003 report in The Moscow News notes that “he was to man a shift at the control panel in that capacity twice a month, just to keep his skills from getting rusty.”
Petrov had been told repeatedly by his superiors that the United States intended to overwhelm Soviet forces with a massive nuclear strike. It was his duty to push the button at the first sign of an attack. And he knew that duty well; the commander had written the manual instructions for what to do in just an event.
The system at Serpukhov-15 relied on human monitoring of the satellite imagery, but the Soviets, concerned with human fallibility, added a computer system to warn of potential threats, while minimizing human interfence. On the night of September 26, the Soviet’s electronic Golem alerted Petrov and his fellow colleagues to an apparent launch from the US mainland. Petrov sat watching a huge screen displaying satellite imagery of North America, when "an alarm at the command and control post went off with red lights blinking on the terminal.”
“It was a nasty shock,” Petrov later recounted to The Moscow News. “Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me. What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems - on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct; the probability factor is two."
Which is apparently the highest probability the system would allow: near-certainty.
Duty officer Petrov had a decision to make, and very little time to make it. He could push the button, initiating an irreversible chain reaction in a system geared to launch a counter-strike without human interference. Or he could report up the command chain (the end point being General Secretary Andropov with his nuclear briefcase), with any US missiles taking only fifteen minutes to reach Soviet territory. It was impossible to analyze such a situation comprehensively in minutes. All Petrov had to rely on was his intuition, and a growing suspicion that things weren’t right. “Missile attacks do not start from just one base, he reasoned. He also was aware that “lots of things a computer could mistake for a missile launch."
Working with questionable but possibly accurate information, the Lt. Colonel deemed the signal a false alarm. But his uncertainty only grew. The computer system indicated a second missile launch from the continental US missile fields toward the Soviet Union. Then a third missile, then a fourth and a fifth. The alarms sounding in Seperov 15 were deafening. Lt. Col. Petrov stood watching a red button flashing "Start" in bright lettering. Time was running out - he could not wait to confirm the launch by radar. Soviet land radar was incapable of detecting any incoming missiles from beyond the horizon, which would only have been useless information by the time it was confirmed. He made his decision: Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov would not press the button.
The mistaken signal had its origins in the peculiarly Soviet means of detecting ICBM launches. Instead of looking down on the entire Earth's surface like US satellites, Soviet satellites of the time aimed at an oblique angle, from a distance, watching the line between the upper atmosphere and outer space. This reduced the chance of mistaking naturally occurring phenomena for a missile launch. At several miles above the earth, missiles would appear silhouetted against the black background of space. The Soviet system was intended to nix reflections and refractions, along with a whole range of industrial and natural phenomena, as false signals. Yet the sun, the satellite, and US missile fields aligned in such a way that sunlight reflected from high-altitude clouds was electronically interpreted as a launch.
Petrov later described the situation as "God's own joke out of outer space."
At the time, the Lt. Colonel was not at all convinced he had acted correctly by not pressing the button, or by not passing the report up to superiors. "Not 100 percent sure. Not even close to 100 percent," he later told reporter Mark McDonald for a Knight Ridder news report. “Waiting the next 15 minutes to see what would happen was most unnerving: Yes, terrifying. Most unpleasant."
Petrov and the officers present at the bunker waited tensely. There were no more signals of ICBM launches. No missiles rained down on the fatherland. He had made the right decision.
A Republic of insects and grass
Here’s where Petrov’s story moves into high farce. In the non-nuclear aftermath, a high-level commission headed by Col. Gen. Yuri Votintsev, commander in chief of the USSR Missile and Air Defense Forces, investigated the officer’s decision. Petrov later told The Moscow News that upon arrival at the headquarters, Votintsev had promised to put him in for a decoration, but then “put the squeeze” on the Lt. Colonel. Votintsev wanted to know why the operations log was not filled in at the time. Petrov responded that he had a phone in one hand, for reporting the situation up the command chain, and an intercom in the other, for issuing commands to subordinates. He was physically unable to write anything at the time.
Petrov received no commendation for preventing World War III - just a dressing down from his superiors. He understood the tacit reason. If he was to be decorated for that incident, the blame would have had to fall elsewhere - “above all, those who had developed the BMEWS, including our renowned academicians who had received billions and billions in funding.“
What if he had decided otherwise? "If the Soviet Union had overreacted, it could have gone very badly, former KGB officer Oleg A. Gordievsky told The Baltimore Sun. “If war had come, Soviet missiles would have destroyed Britain entirely, at least half of Germany and France, and America would have lost maybe 30 percent of its cities and infrastructure."
That estimate is only for the one side’s destruction; the detection of a Soviet launch by US satellites would have elicited an immediate, devastating response from the Pentagon. "This is the closest we've come to accidental nuclear war," noted Bruce Blair, director of the U.S. Center for Defense Information, of the September 26th incident. A quickly escalating nuclear exchange could very well have emptied or destroyed each side’s remaining arsenals. Reagan’s “morning in America” would have been “mourning in America,” reducing both nations, American and Soviet, to what writer Jonathan Schell described as a “republic of insects and grass.” A subsequent nuclear winter, in which darkness would have fallen across the planet due to atmospheric dust, likely would have spelled the end for civilization, if not the human species.
It was not the first time a Russian commander stood down from orders to fire death-dealing weapons on the west. An even lesser-known story than Petrov’s involves Soviet naval officer Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipo, who is credited with preventing a Soviet nuclear strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“I was simply doing my job”
In case we think such close calls were rarities, it should be remembered the nuclear weapons arsenals remain on hair-trigger alerts. Throughout the cold war there have been at least nine documented incidents of mistaken signals on both the American and Soviet side, when the thermonuclear sword was unsheathed and preparing to strike (flights of geese in one incident, a Norwegian missile launch in another, a rising moon, etc.).
It didn’t help matters when the George W. Bush administration reworked its nuclear response to endorse using small-yield, tactical nuclear missiles against “rogue nations,” a policy that has not been entirely retracted since. Thanks to US theocons taking instruction from Book of Revelations, nuclear war went from unthinkable to thinkable. The interregnum of the Obama administration improved humanity’s odds, which may have been cancelled out by the Biden administration’s rhetoric. And with the Soviet invasion of the Ukraine, all bets are off for restraint from both sides.
Can we rely on men of Petrov and Arkhipo’s forebearance, reserve, and inner strength each time the nuclear clock is one second away from midnight? It’s crazy to expect any one individual in a sensitive position to save humanity - though in this two cases this seems to be precisely what happened.
There may well be untold, classified stories of a similar kind on the US side.
In the end, the Soviet military neither rewarded nor honoured Stanislav Petrov for his actions. It didn’t punish him exactly, either. But his once promising military career had come to an end. He was reassigned to a less sensitive position and soon retired from the military because of stress. He and his sick wife moved to an apartment in Friazino, a town just out of Moscow. A brief but significant eruption of international interest in his story left him with “a clutch of business cards” from both Russian and foreign reporters.
Fortunately, Petrov did get some recognition and respect. In May of 2003, the San Francisco-based Association of World Citizens honoured him with a piddling financial award of $1000.00. Arseny Roginsky, the director of Russia’s human rights organization, Memorial, congratulated Petrov on behalf of AWC in an awards ceremony that took place at the offices of The Moscow News.
"All the 20 years that passed since that moment, I didn't believe I had done something extraordinary,” Petrov told USA Today in 2004. “I was simply doing my job and I did it well."
"Foreigners tend to exaggerate my heroism,” he told another reporter from Moscow. “I was in the right place at the right moment." The man who saved civilization prefers to think there was nothing that extraordinary in his decision. He just listened to his intuition, followed his conscience, and did the job he was assigned to do on that momentous day of September 26, 1983.
These stories remind me, going off on a wee bit of a tangent here, about those stories of U.F.O's spotted over missile launch sites that seem to have mysteriously stopped launches mistakenly almost set off because of computer malfunctions. Perhaps we have angels in human and other forms looking out for us. That's the hope anyway. Great article Geoff and yet another great video thrown in at the end.
What a timely reminder, Geoff. I was only aware of the second one, but good to know that there were two guys who refused to 'follow orders'. We need more of these kinds of people to save us from the biosecurity state and its utterly evil players. Also, those guys are hot...and I don't even like men in uniform!