The story of when Stanislav Petrov saved the world from atomic war

On 26 September the UN celebrates the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. On this very day, 37 years ago, the decision of a Soviet colonel prevented a probable atomic holocaust

Poster of the film about Stanislav Petrov released in 2013 (Photo: Statement Film) On 26 September 2013 the leaders of the General Assembly The UN met to discuss nuclear disarmament and in December of the same year the Assembly established on that date the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The first day was celebrated in 2014, and is one of the tools with which the UN promotes the need for disarmament in civil society. Atomic weapons continue to be a danger to human survival, and this will also be discussed at the 75th UN General Assembly, now underway.

In fact, three years after its introduction, the Treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons has not yet entered into force. It would be a first step towards the goal of total disarmament promoted by today's international day. Yet only 45 states have ratified it, the commitment of at least 6 others is lacking. Our country, which hosts at least 40 US atomic bombs in the NATO bases of Aviano and Ghedi, has neither signed nor ratified the treaty. In 2017, over 240 parliamentarians from the past legislature, especially Pd and M5s, had signed an appeal to promote its ratification, most of those parliamentarians were re-elected and are part of the government majority.

September 26 falls also the anniversary of an episode of the Cold War which is closely linked to the objectives of this international day. The protagonist was a Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov.

The accident

On the night of September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was at the Serpukhov-15 military base. Here came the signals of the Oko (eye) satellites, placed in orbit to detect the launch of missiles by the enemy. In the event of an attack, the warning system, which Petrov had helped to design, would give the Soviets time to react with a counterattack. Normal Mad doctrine, mutual assured destruction.

(Photo: Scott Peterson / Getty Images) But that night an alarm went off: a missile had been launched from the United States. In short, four more were launched. The computers had no doubts: five Minuteman ICBMs were in flight. Petrov had to make a decision, he had to do it quickly: Should he step up the chain of command and confirm that an attack was underway?

Petrov finally decided it was a false alarm. As he later recounted, he couldn't be totally sure, but he figured the US wouldn't waste a first strike by launching just five warheads. America certainly did not lack nuclear weapons, as did the Soviet Union, which they knew would react with all necessary force.

Foolproof?

Fiction had already explored the theme of the conflict with nuclear weapons triggered by a trivial technical error: before Wargames (1983) we had A Proof of Error, a 1962 book that in 1964 became a film directed by Sydney Lumet.

Fortunately, Petrov's story obviously had a happy ending: those missiles had never been there. Had Petrov confirmed the attack he saw on the computers, the Soviet nuclear counterattack could have been launched. And at that point the US would have really attacked.

What had caused the instruments to fail? Eventually it was discovered that the satellites had interpreted as casting the simple reflection of the sun on the clouds. Who knows if Petrov knew at the time that the Americans had also had similar misadventures. It is now in the public domain that on November 9, 1979, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) warning system announced a massive Soviet missile attack. The alert was immediately triggered, but before anyone pressed the red button, it was discovered that a simulation tape had been loaded by mistake. When he heard this, Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev wrote worriedly to President Jimmy Carter: "I think you will agree with me that there should be no mistakes in these matters."

An (almost) forgotten hero

Stanislav Petrov died on May 19, 2017 at the age of 77, and many international newspapers dedicated an obituary to him. Despite this, his fame is still quite limited. One reason is probably the Cold War: only in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall did the story begin to emerge. The first to tell it and praise Petrov’s work was General Yuri Votintsev, then commander of missile defense. In particular, it was an interview with the general published by Die Bild in 1998 that introduced everyone to the man who had saved the world. Before that, not even Petrov's daughter Yelena knew. His wife Raisa died in 1997 without her ever telling him about it.

From that moment there have been interviews, based on which the story as we know it now has been reconstructed. A detailed analysis of the episode and how Petrov reasoned in those moments can be found in the essay Disabling Deterrence and Preventing War within the book Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons (2019). Petrov has always said that he only did his job, aware that his mistake might not have been repaired. He was neither rewarded nor scolded by his superiors, except for the fact that he did not adequately record the episode in the registers.

Petrov has nevertheless received several international awards. In 2006 he traveled to New York to receive a UN award, and the interviews shot on that occasion were used for the 2013 documentary The Man who saved the world. On that occasion, however, the Russian federation officially wanted to have its say: a single man could never have avoided, or caused, the launch of nuclear weapons. Even if he had reported the attack, the Soviet counterattack would have started only if confirmed by other sources, the embassy wrote in a statement.

The threat is still there

Politics aside , it is true that Petrov himself was not convinced that he was a hero. According to some, 1983 was a very tense year, and one news of the attack would have been enough. But we can't be sure what would have happened. In the face of uncertainty, however, Petrov acted in the most correct way.

If Petrov is remembered on this day, it should not be only for making the right decision under pressure. Nor to argue about how robust the systems of the time (and current) were to avoid catastrophic errors. But because that incident was one of the many cases in which we came close to the atomic holocaust. His actions remind us that the only foolproof system for our security is the total elimination of the thousands of nuclear weapons around the world.