President Ronald Reagan gives a speech on the Strategic Defense Initiative from the Oval Office, on March 23, 1983. This speech took place just five months before Stanislav Petrov chose to hesitate, a decision that prevented nuclear war. Public Domain
There were five nuclear missiles incoming. The sirens roared and wailed overhead, shattering the silence of the tomblike bunker. The computer monitor read “Launch” in red letters. Some seconds later, the message changed to “Missile Strike.” This was it. This was the end.
There, in the breathless half-light of the bunker, under the ghostly glow of buttons and monitors, 44-year-old duty officer Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov battled with the shock. For five minutes he waited, delaying the phone call to his superiors that would initiate the Soviet Union’s retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States. All he had to do was lift the receiver and utter a few words to the commanders, and an apocalyptic future would ensue, a nightmare scenario brought to life, the globe wreathed in flame. The satellite warning system was offering Petrov its highest degree of certainty that the attack was genuine.
But something made Petrov hesitate.
The future of humanity hung suspended in that long, lonely moment inside a bunker 80 miles from Moscow on the brink of the Russian winter.
The Man and the Decision
Stanislav Petrov had thick, dark hair and eyebrows and a piercing gaze. He was creative, artistic, skeptical, thoughtful, and gifted in engineering. Born in 1939, Petrov had grown up in an abusive and unloving home. His parents forced him into the military at age 16, where he was recognized for his intellectual abilities and assigned to work in an air defense research facility after completing studies at the Kiev Higher Engineering Radio-Technical College. In 1973, while still in the military, he met and married a cinema operator named Raisa. They had two children, and Petrov remained dedicated to his family throughout his life.
In September of 1983, when Petrov faced the incoming missile alert alone, the relations between the United States and the USSR were near rock-bottom. As nuclear security expert Bruce G. Blair stated, “The Soviet Union was on hair-trigger alert.” Not long before the nuclear incident, a Soviet jet had shot down a civilian airliner, killing everyone on board, including a U.S. congressman. Further, President Ronald Reagan had announced a European missile defense system that made the Soviets uncomfortable. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov feared a preemptive strike from the Americans that would take out the Soviets’ own nuclear capabilities.
A photograph of Korean Air Lines HL7442, the airliner shot down by Soviet aircraft after drifting into prohibited airspace. (Commonist/CC BY-SA 3.0)
So when the warnings of a missile launch came in just after midnight on Sept. 26, 1983, Petrov might easily have sounded the alarm. Probably, a lot of other Russians would have. Petrov later recalled: “My colleagues were all professional soldiers; they were taught to give and obey orders.”
But to Petrov, who was of a somewhat different mold, something seemed off. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he said in a 1999 interview with The Washington Post. One anomalous data point that cautioned him against a rash reaction was this: Only five missiles had been launched. Yet Petrov had repeatedly been told that if a launch came, it would be massive—a first strike intended to wipe out Soviet defenses all at once, possibly even preventing a retaliation of any kind. He reflected, “When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles. You can do little damage with just five missiles.” If the Americans had truly only launched five warheads, those five weren’t going to destroy the Soviet Union, and the American commanders were simply inviting a much more devastating retaliation. Why warn the Soviets with a contained strike, giving them the chance to wipe out the United States in return? Plus, the Soviet ground-based radar installations reported no attack. It didn’t add up.
Moreover, Petrov played a role in designing and installing the technology in the bunker. He knew the early-warning satellite system better than most. And he knew it had flaws. In the end, he calculated that the chances the strike was real were about 50 percent. He stared down the end of the world and didn’t blink. “I made a decision, and that was it.”
He called up his superiors and told them it was a false alarm, even though he himself remained unsure. However, as he told the BBC in 2013, “Nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one.” And he said later, “I didn’t want to be the one responsible for starting a third world war.”
The reality was this: The satellite system had misread sunlight reflecting off clouds as ballistic missile engine exhaust. It sent a false alarm to the bunker, indicating that missiles had been launched from a site in North Dakota, but in reality, there was no attack.
The Aftermath
Petrov’s cool head and thoughtful temperament likely prevented nuclear Armageddon that day, saving millions of lives. But he never relished talking about it, spitting retorts at journalists’ questions along the lines of, “Nonsense! I was just doing my job.”
Protest against the nuclear arms race between the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union, in The Hague, Netherlands, 1983. (Marcel Antonisse/CC0)
An intense investigation by Soviet authorities followed the incident. Petrov’s discovery of the system’s failure posed a problem for his superiors; it was an embarrassment to them. Petrov was unceremoniously reassigned and denied future promotions. He retired from the military not long after. The Soviets kept the incident under wraps for 10 years, and the full story saw the light of day only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After his time in the military, Petrov lived a quiet life as pensioner in a Moscow suburb.
Petrov believed that someday a nuclear strike will occur unless we eliminate all nuclear weapons. He was skeptical of the warning system back in 1983 (which probably saved the world), and he maintained that same skepticism with regard to people.
As Britannica’s Stella Kleinman wrote, “Petrov does not trust people, nor does he trust machines. What he trusts least of all is a person who becomes a cog in a machine.” He told Time magazine, “The slightest false move can lead to colossal consequences.”
In the later years of his life, Petrov finally received recognition for his stoic heroism and the levelheaded decision he made in the control room with the world’s fate hanging in the balance. In 1998, a retired Soviet air commander credited Petrov with making the right decision. In 2004, the Association of World Citizens gave him a trophy and some money. And in 2014, a documentary was made about him celebrating his history-making decision. Still, these awards and notices are meager compared with the service he rendered to humanity. It’s quite possible that without Petrov and whatever force convinced him to stay calm and critical in that crucial moment, you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.
Stanislav Petrov died on May 19, 2017, at the age of 77.
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]
Walker Larson
Author
Prior to becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master's in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, "Hologram" and "Song of Spheres."
