The Man Who Did Nothing — Stanislav Petrov and Why You’re Alive

[Comment: Your humble author jumbled up his time zone conversions. The intro has been edited to reflect his lack of attention to detail.]

Almost exactly forty years ago, the world nearly ended. It was 25 September 1983, a Monday, just after 5:30 PM, as Americans on the East Coast were commuting home to grab a cold beer and an evening watching Magnum P.I. If not for the actions, or inaction, by a man, Stanislav Petrov, sitting in a bunker in Serpukhov-15, those Americans’ evening plans would have been interrupted by the blinding flash of thousands of nuclear explosions. Undoubtedly confused Americans in the Plains States might have been unlucky enough to have seen the sky marred by the off-white plumes of hundreds of LGM-30 Minuteman ICBMs as they arced their way across the sky. Those near Strategic Air Command airbases would have been startled by the roar of B-52s taking off on suicide missions to destroy Soviet cities and industries. In the unlikely event any returned, the pilots would have found their runways as vaporized as the millions of people across the northern hemisphere. You, no matter your age, are probably only reading this due to the skepticism of Lt Col Stanislav Petrov. Insert almost any other Soviet officer and you would have likely died, either in the initial strike or from radiation poisoning or, if lucky, from slow starvation while trying to eke out an existence in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Or you would have never even been born. In 1983, the US possessed 23,305 nuclear warheads. The Soviets had more than 35,000.

It’s easy to forget, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, how tense the atmosphere was between the US and the Soviet Union. That tension was perhaps never greater than it was in the early years of the 1980s. On 01 September 1983, just weeks before the incident in question, a Soviet Su-15 Flagon shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after the 747 drifted into Soviet airspace. On board KAL007 was Larry McDonald, a congressman representing Georgia’s 7th district, and a staunch foe of communism. The nuclear arms race was still churning out new, frightening capabilities; a tit-for-tat escalation of Soviet deployments of SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and US deployment of Pershing II medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), both of which were aimed at shortening the response time required to destroy much of Europe should the need arise. In early 1981, the US began flying strategic bombers straight at the Soviet Union only to turn around at the last minute. These flights, supposedly intended on gauging Soviet early warning responses, often occurred multiple times a week and continuing until 1983. US “boomers,” Ohio-class submarines (SSBNs) carrying highly accurate UGM-133 Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), each with multiple warheads, routinely deployed to waters close to the Soviet Union and her vassal states. Couple these realities with the increased bellicosity of a new American president, Ronald Reagan, who earlier in the year announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet nerves were stretched tighter than strings on a guitar tuned up a full step, and they constantly feared an American first strike. They knew they had painfully little time to mount a response. They needed a system that would alert them to a US attack. Luckily for them, they had such a system.

Oko. Designed beginning in the early 1970s, Oko consisted of numerous satellites that would detect ICBM launches by observing their launch plumes in the infrared spectrum and was bolstered by ground-based space surveillance and EW radars. By 1982, Oko was finally fully operational. It was not, however, without problems.

The most obvious issue was that the satellites in Molniya orbits, which were highly elliptical and offered a lengthy dwell time over the northern hemisphere (from whence US IBCMs would come), were prone to blowing themselves up due to faulty self-destruct mechanisms. This, of course, led to copious amounts of space debris. The less obvious issue was that the whole system was new and had not exactly gained a reputation for reliability. It was possible that, if sunlight reflected just right off high-altitude clouds, Oka might indicate the launch of US ICBMs. That’s exactly what happened on 26 September 1983.

My mind’s eye imagines that Lt Col Petrov was sitting as comfortably as possible at a desk inside the newly built Oka control station, situated about 90 miles southwest of Moscow, perhaps drinking coffee and staving off boredom by reading Dostoevsky. Watch positions are often largely boring, interrupted only by inspections, exercises, and brief moments of intense excitement. I don’t know how Soviet early warning systems alerted (it was probably just “LAUNCH” displayed on a computer screen), but for narrative purposes let’s say that at shortly after midnight, a klaxon blared and red lights flashed, jostling Petrov out of his lethargy. He spilled his coffee, glanced up from Dostoevsky and saw that Oka’s computer system indicated the launch of a single ICBM that was now hurtling towards the Soviet Union at about 17,000 miles per hour. “Could this be a US first strike?” he may have wondered. He didn’t have much time to make that determination — the missile would arrive in about twenty minutes — and then set off a command-and-control chain reaction that would culminate in the Soviet launch of an overwhelming response, as per their doctrine. Soviet leaders at the time truly believed that the US was preparing for a quick first strike, with the hope of decapitating Soviet command and destroying the Soviets’ own ability to launch a retaliation. It would have been a “use ’em or lose ‘em” scenario. This is why they were so troubled by the deployment of Pershing missiles, SSBNs, and the constant maneuvering by US strategic bombers. To them, the US was acting irrationally and provocatively. Thus, it might have been rational for Petrov to conclude that, yes, this was the beginning of a US first strike. Doctrinally, he was required to report any launch, no matter how large.

But he didn’t. I have to think that, no matter how cool of a customer he may have been and no matter how well he was trained, Petrov was filled with anxiety, his hands shaky and his brow glistening with sweat. At this moment, he may have figuratively felt the weight of the world compressing his spine. He was the only person standing in the way of nuclear Armageddon. It must have been excruciating. Yet he had good reasons for deep contemplation of the situation. First of all, Petrov had been taught that any US first strike would include overwhelming numbers of ICBM and SRBM launches, not a single missile. Secondly, Petrov was not confident in Oka’s reliability. Instead of reporting to his superiors the launch of a US missile heading towards the Soviet Union, Petrov decided to wait*. Perhaps during this wait, he considered that Oka failed in an entirely different way than it actually did, and the system simply didn’t detect the launch of hundreds of other missiles. That probably seemed unlikely. Perhaps he considered the launch the effort of a rogue actor in the US hellbent on destroying the world. That also probably seemed unlikely to our intrepid hero. So, like a man diagnosed with terminal cancer by a back-alley doctor, he wanted to get a second opinion. The land-based radar portion of Oka, which lagged about 15 minutes behind the satellite capability as it could not detect anything beyond the horizon, didn’t pick up the missile, and that alleged missile never detonated on or above Soviet territory (if it had, we can surmise that Petrov would have been executed for treason). Petrov concluded for certain that the system had malfunctioned. A short time later, while Petrov waited, Oka reported that four additional missiles, launched one after another, were now on their way. Again, Petrov waited, and again the missiles were not detected, nor did they explode. Petrov’s instincts proved sound. The world would not end in the dichotomous inferno and subsequent winter of nuclear destruction that day. Human beings across the globe went on with their lives, completely oblivious to just how close they came to death. They wouldn’t know until 1998.

US-Soviet tensions did not abate at this point, and arguably only grew when, in November 1983, NATO conducted the Able Archer exercise, which basically simulated a nuclear conflict right at the time the Soviets were looking for evidence of a US/NATO first strike. How we didn’t end up in WWIII during those autumn months in 1983 is a miracle.

Petrov’s story does not end here, either. He was reportedly questioned, I imagine quite intensely, by his chain of command. Though it was deemed that he acted properly, he was allegedly undone by the bane of all watch officers: Failure to properly fill out the military logbook. According to Petrov, he was promised a reward, but never received one. He couldn’t, after all, be given a reward because that would have been an embarrassment to those who failed to make sure the system worked. They weren’t to be punished for their failures, so he couldn’t receive a reward. Instead, he was transferred to a lesser post and retired a few months later. He then had a nervous breakdown.

It wasn’t until decades later that Petrov would be acknowledged as almost single-handedly saving the world. The Association of World Citizens, in 2004, recognized him and provided an unknown financial award. He was honored by the UN, and in 2013, received the Dresden Peace Prize. In 2014, Danish documentary filmmaker Peter Anthony revealed The Man Who Saved the World premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival. He was also discussed in two books, 1983 and The Brink.

Stanislav Petrov passed away on 19 May 2017. We owe him a debt of gratitude. He was, unquestionably, the right man at the right place at the right time. The last four decades would have transpired very differently were it not for him doing nothing.

* There are conflicting accounts about this. It isn’t clear if Petrov simply didn’t report the incident at all, or if he did and managed to convince his immediate superiors that the alert was an error. Petrov himself later stated that he reported it as a false alert and his superiors agreed with his assessment.