Those of us who are considered baby boomers can remember those dark days of the Cold War, when we were certain that one day the world might actually horribly end in fire, with ourselves in our homes or at our jobs and being suddenly blown to bits by nuclear weapons incoming from our sworn enemy, Russia. We were certain it could happen, any day, unexpectedly. We could be asleep in our beds, and not wake up, or wake up to the horror of nuclear annihilation. And when we were young we would be up late at night talking about it, “Would it really happen that way?” “No, it won’t happen!” “Yes, it could happen.” “Oh my God, we’re all gonna die!”
Yeah, we were scared. Really, we were! We believed it could happen, and that it was only a matter of time. Not if, but when.
And yet, here we all are, alive today. So…nuclear war with Russia did not happen back then. We can all be relieved. Right?
Well, guess what?
It almost really did happen!
We really almost did get blown up.
If it weren’t for one brave man, we really all would have died.
We are all alive today thanks to the independent thinking and courage of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. And today, he is known as “The Man Who Saved the World.”
He was on duty one dark night, September 26, 1983, at the Soviet Union’s early warning system. Just after midnight, the alarm went off. The new computer was telling him that missiles were incoming, an attack from the United States. The screen flashed in red “LAUNCH!” This was during a difficult time for U.S. and Soviet relations. If Petrov had done as instructed, which was to alert his superiors of incoming missiles from the United States, then the Soviet Union would surely counter-attack with their own deadly weapons of mass destruction. And yet, he did not do as he was told. He just had a feeling, an intuition, that something just wasn’t right with their high tech warning system. And he believed the alarm might be false. He believed the alert was false because the alarm only indicated five incoming missiles, and he thought the United States would send a lot more than just five missiles. There was also nothing on the radar. In addition, the computer system was new and he did not trust it completely. If Petrov alerted his superiors, there would have been an all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus, basically, this one man saved the world on that fateful night.
He was reprimanded for a mistake in the logbook that he was responsible for, but not punished. He was then given a “less sensitive” job and later took early retirement from the Soviet military. He said that he never imagined he’d be in that situation, and that it was the first, and as far as he knew, the last time such a thing happened. His story was not known until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2004 he received a “World Citizen Award” in recognition of averting a catastrophe.
He would say that he was not a hero, but that he was just in the right place at the right time. He would often feel annoyed with reporters chasing after him for interviews, and just wanted peace and quiet and privacy. But when he did finally speak out about the events that night, he would say that he believed that if a nuclear war did happen, it would at first mean the loss of half of the population of the United States alone, and the same for the people of the U.S.S.R. It would be the devastation of the world. With the ash in the sky, the sun’s light would not be able to reach the Earth, and there would be a nuclear winter. Billions of people, and all other living things, would eventually die horrible deaths of sickness and starvation. Humanity would be extinct. There would be nothing left on this Earth. When he was asked, How do we make this world safe? He would say, Not to live with hate, with thousands of missiles aimed at each other. We must learn to live together, or perish.
Stanislav Petrov passed away in 2017, but we will never forget that we are all alive today, not because of what he did, but because of what he didn’t do.
If you want to know more about how the world actually almost ended, check out these resources:
1. Reynolds, Tony, and Calver, Paul, “Real Lives, Unsung Heroes,” Barron’s, 2017.
2. DVD Video, The Man Who Saved the World, Syndicado. In English and in Russian with Subtitles. (Freaking incredible…OMG! You! Must!! See this!!!)
3. Garber, Megan, “The Man Who Saved the World by Doing Nothing,” The Atlantic, September 26, 2013.
