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Stanislav Petrov , the man who saved the world from nuclear war

‘I was only 50/50’: Russian who saved world from nuclear war, New York Post,  17 Sept 15  FRYAZINO, Russia — The elderly former Soviet military officer who answers the door is known in the West as “the man who saved the world.”

A movie with that title, which hits theaters in the United States on Friday, tells the harrowing story of Sept. 26, 1983, when Stanislav Petrov made a decision credited by many with averting a nuclear war.

An alarm had gone off that night, signaling the launch of US intercontinental ballistic missiles, and it was up to the 44-year-old lieutenant colonel to determine, quickly, whether the attack on the Soviet Union was real.

“I realized that I had to make some kind of decision, and I was only 50/50,” Petrov told the Associated Press. Despite the data coming in from the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellites over the United States, Petrov decided to consider it a false alarm. Had he done otherwise, the Soviet leadership could have responded by ordering a retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States.

What made this even more dangerous was that the Soviet Union appears genuinely to have feared a surprise US nuclear attack during what was an exceptionally tense period of the Cold War. That month, the Soviets had shot down a passenger plane flying to South Korea from the US, suspecting it of spying. The United States, after a series of provocative military maneuvers, was preparing for a major NATO exercise, called Able Archer, which simulated preparations for a nuclear attack……….

Petrov reported to his commander that the system was giving false information. He was not at all certain, but his decision was informed by the fact that Soviet ground radar could not confirm a launch. The radar system picked up incoming missiles only well after any launch, but he knew it to be more reliable than the satellites.

The false alarm was later found to have been caused by a malfunction of the satellite, which mistook the reflection of the sun off high clouds for a missile launch.

Petrov was not rewarded for his actions, most likely because doing so would have brought to light the failure of the Soviets’ early-warning satellites………….. http://nypost.com/2015/09/17/i-was-only-5050-russian-who-saved-world-from-nuclear-war/

September 18, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, weapons and war