#1983 soviet nuclear false alarm incident

[ammg-old2]

It’s been a year since the Russians invaded Ukraine and launched the biggest conventional war in Europe since the Nazis. One of the things that I think we’ve all worried about in that time is the underlying problem of nuclear weapons.

This is a nuclear-armed power at war with hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of Europe. This is the nightmare that American foreign policy has dreaded since the beginning of the nuclear age.

And I think people have kind of put it out of their mind, how potentially dangerous this conflict is, which is understandable, but also, I think, takes us away from thinking about something that is really the most important foreign problem in the world today.

During the Cold War, we would’ve thought about that every day, but these days, people just don’t think about it, and I think they should.

[sigridstumb]

Stanislav Petrov Day

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: Станисла́в Евгра́фович Петро́в; 7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm. His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war which could have wiped out half of the population of the countries involved. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned. Because of his decision not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike amid this incident, Petrov is often credited as having "saved the world".

From Wikipedia

[freshva]

I think it is absolute goddamn horseshit that whenever I actively try to make something using my knowledge of storycraft and characterization, it often results in people not being invested in the thing that I make, or I often get hung up about the details of it. I begin to wonder if, perhaps, this is going to resonate with people, or make them think I'm doing a good job at what I'm doing, or chase that sweet, sweet drug known as validation.

Then I tell the story of how when I was 18 years old, I was the Storyteller of a game of Vampire the Masquerade over an old IRC chat from a play-by-post roleplaying site based entirely on the (bullshit) events of the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. Like the entire impetus of the story was to get to the plotpoint of "vampire hunters try to purge the world in nuclear fire to make God happy and your coterie has to stop them and let history get rewritten" and one of my friends says that the entire series of events I had happen to get to that point sounds like something they'd genuinely want to play and I am made to realize that passion, even if it's dumb bullshit, has far more impact than simple technical skill with a thing.

I will one day internalize this lesson.

[rosszulorzott]

thinking of Sting releasing Russians in 1985 when he couldn't have known has his dream had already been proven true in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident

people like Sting and Stanislav Petrov are our heroes who show that we are always allied directly with the people whatever wars their/our leaders cook up

[freelanceexorcist]

TIL how close I and all I held dear came to being vaporized during the Cold War because the town I lived in (still live in) was a prime target due to it being the home of Westinghouse's global headquarters at the time and NGL, I'm retroactively shitting peach pits over it. I'm referring to the Soviet nuclear false alarm incident of 1983 and I hope the most beautiful part of the Universe was set aside for Stanislav Petrov when he went home to it.

[nooralsibai]

Scientists Say We're Closer to Nuclear Armageddon Than Any Other Point in History 

Story by Noor Al-Sibai

Image credit: Mark Stevenson/UIG via Getty / Futurism Original published by Futurism on January 24, 2023. 

Black Pilled

The scientist-activists who run the Doomsday Clock have once again ticked it forward, bringing humanity's estimated chances of its own nuclear annihilation closer than ever.

A statement published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group behind the Doomsday Clock, cited Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the potential for a "hot war" between NATO and Russia as its reasoning for moving the clock a mere 90 seconds to midnight.

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and the scientists who would have been his colleagues had the US granted him security clearance to work on the atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, the BAS has every year since 1947 warned of the preceding annum's biggest risks to humanity — and this year, those risks are all about Russia.

"Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict — by accident, intention, or miscalculation — is a terrible risk," the statement reads. "The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high."

Hot War

While not mentioned in the statement, the country formerly known as the Soviet Union has some pretty jarring past precedents to take into consideration: the 1983 "false alarm" incident in which USSR radar picked up and subsequently alerted officials about phony readings from the West that were initially interpreted as warhead-carrying spy planes coming out of the US.

The protocol, which wasn't followed, would have been to strike back. If Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet Air Defense officer in charge of the early-warning station located that detected the misinterpreted signals, hadn't trusted his gut when it told him they were false alarms, nuclear war would almost certainly have broken out.

Back in the present, the concerned scientists note that beyond just the heating up of the new cold war, Russia's Ukrainian aggression has also "undermine[d] global efforts to combat climate change," and its fake news about Ukraine developing bioweapons may indicate that it's doing exactly that.

While "there is no clear pathway for forging a just peace that discourages future aggression under the shadow of nuclear weapons," the BAS urged open engagement with peace talks between NATO and Russia — not just for the sake of heading off war, but for the sake of helping the planet avoid further catastrophe, too.

More on nukes: New Study Shows Where You Should Hide To Survive A Nuclear Attack

[womprat99]

The Thing About Today – September 26

The Thing About Today – September 26

September 26, 2020 Day 270 of 366

  September 26th is the 270th day of the year. It is Dominion Day in New Zealand. It commemorates the granting of Dominion status – a constitutional term of art used to signify a semi-independent Commonwealth realm – but the holiday goes generally unobserved in the country.

  In the United States, today is “celebrated” as National Compliance Officer Day, Nationa…

[joriswegner]

„For the Prevention of Nuclear Annihilation“ is a fictional Soviet medal never awarded to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, whose prudence during a nuclear false alarm incident in 1983 probably prevented a third world war. As a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, he rightly considered it a computer error when an early warning satellite signaled the alleged launch of American intercontinental missiles.
 Petrov was neither awarded nor penalized for not initializing a retaliation strike.

[henk-heijmans]

Stanislav Petrov (1939 – 2017 / Russian) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident - by AP/Pavel Golovkin, Russian

[mindthemuse]

On July 16, 1945, humanity entered its atomic age. Several months later two rudimentary bombs ended a conflict; the horror left humanity debating its necessity. It was not horrific enough to stop making them.

On October 27th, 1962, humanity was on the cusp of a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis forced the world to hold its breath as the United States and the Soviet Union held civilization at the edge. Though President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev were polar opposites in manner; they pulled back from the brink with resolutions that benefited both nations and established a line of communication to prevent future incidents.

Humanity was saved by diplomacy and cooler heads.

On September 26th, 1983, an early warning system of the Soviet Union reported a launch of ballistic missiles from the United States. Officer Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was on duty that night and would have been expected to trigger a retaliatory nuclear attack at the United States according to Soviet protocol. Against protocol and training, Petrov used logic and instinct to judge the incident as a false alarm due to the size of the ‘attack’ and the newness of the system. He prevented a possible nuclear conflict caused by humor error.  

Humanity was saved by luck, and could have as easily been damned without ever knowing the truth.

Jennet Shepard remembers these incidents when she thinks about the Krogan. She remembers how luck essentially saved humanity from themselves. Whatever triggered the Krogan Nuclear war should not be seen as moral judgement of a race's character. She can't speak for other species, but she can speak for her own; the only difference between Krogans and Humans is luck and the cost of survival.

[voiceof]

“Technologies that can be used to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it.” -- Apparently.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect — just good enough to make the enemy think something happened that it provokes a knee-jerk and reckless response of retaliation.” -- This is the most dangerous consequence of the fakery. However. It would have to be knee-jerk indeed. While this article claims that the fakery tech is always ahead of the detection tech, knowledge of what could be possible at a base level could be enough to think twice about retaliation.

Take, for example, the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, in which Petrov did not believe two separate nuclear attack alarms and thus did not call a counterstrike. His knowledge of the potential number of missiles to be involved in a strike led him to let it go.

[zoltanberrigomo]

Statistical Significance

Item #: SCP-3285

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures:  Foundation agents have been placed in positions of power within the governments of Israel, Iran, North Korea, Japan, India, and Pakistan. At the discretion of the O5 council, a sequence of events culminating in a nuclear exchange between Israel/Iran, North Korea/Japan, or India/Pakistan can be put into motion at approximately a week's notice. Description: SCP-3285 is the collective designation given to patterns of events which bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation before de-escalation. The archetypal events grouped under this designation are:

SCP-3285-001: On Sep 26, 1983, Soviet early warnings satellites recorded five Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from an American military base. The event occurred in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, shift supervisor at the Soviet command center, chose to report to his superiors that the incoming data was erroneous. The available evidence did not support this unequivocal judgement and Lt. Col. Petrov later described his choice as a "gut decision." Although ultimately correct, Lt. Col. Petrov was reprimanded, ostensibly for improperly documenting the event in the logs, and relieved of duty.  It is notable that Lt. Col. Petrov was the on-duty staff officer as a result of covering for a colleague who was ill.

SCP-3285-002:  In Oct. 1963, in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, the captain of a Soviet submarine stationed off the coast of Cuba mistook depth charges  for an assault and gave the order to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American ship.  Regulations required unanimity among the top three officers; while the first officer concurred with the captain, the second officer, Commander Vasili Arkhipov, refused to agree to the launch.  

SCP-3285-003: On November 9, 1973, a computer error at NORAD resulted in a faulty notification of a Soviet nuclear attack. Initial estimates placed the number of incoming Soviet missiles at approximately 250, which was almost immediately revised to over 2,200. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was advised the decision to retaliate must be made within minutes. However, just as this deadline was passing additional information became available which contradicted the initial reports.

Additional events considered part of SCP-3285 are:

The entirety of the Cuban missile crisis. 

The assassination of John F. Kennedy (which lead to a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in the majority of war games simulated by the Foundation). 

The  Norwegian rocket incident of 1995 (when Russian radars recorded an unexpected missile launch, consistent with an attack from a nuclear-armed submarine, projected to hit Moscow in under  than 5 minutes). 

The Thule false alarm of 1960 (when NORAD reported a 99.9% likelihood of a Soviet nuclear strike landing within minutes).

Additional █ classified instances believed to be part of SCP-3285 are listed in document SCP-3285-LJKW.

While the positive outcome associated with each of these events can be explained by reference to the laws of chance, the chance of humanity surviving all the events comprising SCP-3285 is exceedingly small. Precise assignment of probabilities is problematic, but the key observation is that probabilities of independent events multiply. As a result, attempts to assign probabilities to positive outcomes of events in SCP-3285 typically lead to extremely low estimates for the probability of all of them occurring together.

Additional evidence for the anomalous origin of the phenomenon lies in the apparent coincidences or unusual events that prevented many of the events comprising SCP-3285 from escalating into full-blown nuclear war.  Lt. Col. Petrov was on-duty covering for a sick colleague; a different staff officer might have reported to the Kremlin that a nuclear attack was underway. The Thule false alarm occurred during Soviet Premier Khruschev's widely publicized visit to the United States, leading NORAD operators to consider a Soviet attack at the time unlikely. Testimony was not extracted from Lee Harvey Oswald due to his murder by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner without explicit Soviet connections.

The most plausible explanation derives from the anthropic principle. A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have escalated to a "nuclear winter" and the likely extinction of humanity. In all the universes where these events happened, humanity and the Foundation do not exist. Thus any human being alive at the end of the cold war will inhabit a universe where a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union was averted.

Stronger versions of the anthropic principle propose to make predictions based on what a "typical living observer" is likely to experience. This framework appears to match SCP-3285:  given that the cold war has a propensity to repeatedly escalate into nuclear confrontation, the typical living observer will inhabit a universe which comes to brink of nuclear war before ultimately retreating [1]. 

An implication is that humanity is unlikely to survive  confrontations between nuclear powers, as  the anthropic principle cannot ensure humanity's safety in the future. As nuclear weapons grow progressively easier to construct due to technological progress, the danger from SCP-3285 is projected to grow exponentially. In particular, it appears highly unlikely that humanity will survive a future in which small states and private/subnational actors are capable of building substantial nuclear arsenals.

Possibilities for containment: On 5/6/2007, the Historical Dynamics Division proposed a possible means of containment. Project  Controlled Burn is premised on the observation that excesses of violence often drive periods of peace in human history. For example, broad revulsion at the atrocities of Nazi Germany is considered to be responsible for the relative peacefulness of the post-WW-II period in Europe.

It is therefore proposed that a limited nuclear exchange, comprising between 20-40 atomic explosions, would result in a widespread abhorrence of nuclear weapons with a strong preventative effect. The probability that an exchange of that size would lead to the extinction of humanity is believed to be exceedingly small, although a large number of civilian casualties are to be expected.

The Historical Dynamics division has argued that a controlled nuclear war between North Korea and Japan is the most attractive possibility for containment of SCP-3285. Since nuclear weapons were used in World War II on Japanese soil, it is conjectured that the destruction of several Japanese cities would evoke a particularly strong wave of worldwide sympathy. It is therefore recommended that, if the Foundation chooses to provoke a nuclear exchange, either Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or both) be included within the list of targets to emphasize historical resonance.

The Ethics Committee approved Project Controlled Burn on 2/8/2013. On 1/7/2015, the O5 council voted 10-3 to forego implementation, with the proviso that the vote be revisited every five years. On 9/20/2017, following increased tensions between US and North Korea with threats of nuclear attack on both sides, the O5 council met to discuss the matter again. The possibility that an uncontrolled nuclear exchange in which one side emerged as the clear victor might in fact accelerate nuclear proliferation was discussed. By a vote of 8-5, the previous decision was affirmed. The next vote is scheduled for 1/7/2020.

[1]  There are a number of mathematical ways to formalize this statement. The simplest is to model relations between cold war powers as a one-dimensional random walk which has a tendency to move towards an absorptive state corresponding to nuclear war. Conditional on lack of absorption, Eq. (3.4) of E.A. Van Doorn, ``Quasi-stationary distributions and convergence to quasi-stationarity of birth-death processes,'' Annals of Applied Probability, pp. 683-700, 1991 provides a concentration result for such a random walk around the absorptive state. 

[newstfionline]

Stanislav Petrov, Who Averted Nuclear War, Dies at 77

AP, Sept. 19, 2017

MOSCOW--Stanislav Petrov, a former Soviet military officer known in the West as “the man who saved the world” for his role in averting a nuclear war over a false missile warning at the height of the Cold War, has died at 77.

Petrov’s German friend, Karl Schumacher, said Tuesday that he died on May 19. Schumacher called Petrov earlier this month to wish him a happy birthday, but was told by Petrov’s son Dmitry that his father had died. The Russian state Zvezda TV station only reported the death on Tuesday.

Petrov was on night duty at the Soviet military’s early warning facility outside Moscow on Sept. 26, 1983, when an alarm went off, signaling the launch of several U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 44-year-old lieutenant colonel had to quickly determine whether the attack was real. He chose to consider it a false alarm, which it was.

The incident was particularly harrowing as it happened at one of the tensest periods of the Cold War when the Soviet Union appeared to genuinely fear a surprise U.S. nuclear attack.

A few weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a passenger plane flying to South Korea from the U.S., suspecting it of spying, killing all 269 people aboard. The United States, after a series of provocative military maneuvers, was preparing for a major NATO exercise that simulated preparations for a nuclear attack.

In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Petrov recalled the excruciating moments at the secret Serpukhov-15 control center when the fate of the world was in his hands.

“I realized that I had to make some kind of decision, and I was only 50/50,” Petrov told the AP.

The responsibility was enormous.

If he had judged it a real launch, the top Soviet military brass and the Kremlin would have had no time for extra analysis in a few minutes left before the incoming nuclear-tipped missiles hit Soviet territory. They would have likely ordered a retaliatory strike, triggering a nuclear war.

“It was this quiet situation and suddenly the roar of the siren breaks in and the command post lights up with the word ‘LAUNCH,’” Petrov told the AP. “This hit the nerves. I was really taken aback. Holy cow!”

Within minutes of the first alarm, the siren sounded again, warning of a second U.S. missile launch. Soon, the system was reporting that five missiles had been launched.

Petrov recalled standing up as the alarm siren blared and seeing that the others were all looking at him in confusion.

“My team was close to panic and it hit me that if panic sets in then it’s all over,” he said.

Petrov told his commander that the system was giving false information. He was not at all certain, but he was driven 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 determined 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. In fact, he received a reprimand for failing to correctly fill the duty log and retired from the military the following year.

Although his commanding officer did not support Petrov at the time, he was the one who revealed the incident after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If Col. Gen. Yury Votintsev had not spoken out, Petrov said he himself “would have forgotten about it like a bad dream.”

After his story was told, Petrov received accolades, international awards and became known as “the man who saved the world.”

But his role won him little fame in his homeland. He continued to live in a small, unkempt apartment in the Moscow suburb of Fryazino. There have been no official reports or statements about his death from any Russian government agency.

Schumacher said it was important for him to let the world know about Petrov’s passing because “we owe this man a lot.”

[monicaqli-blog]

SA: Stanislav Petrov

With this week’s focus being on human in the security system, specifically how they are usually the weakest link, I thought I’d blog about Stanisla Petrov, who is a great example of when humans are the best part of the system.

On 26 September 1983 (during the Cold War), Petrov single-handedly saved the world from a nuclear war. In a nuclear command and control centre outside of Moscow, the system detected five US nuclear warheads headed for the Soviet Union. Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike? The Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation in the event of an attack. There would be no time to double-check the warning system, let alone seek negotiations with the US.

Petrov did not report the incoming strike. He concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. He was right.

Context

The US administration at that time, led by Ronald Regan, had a far more hard-line stance against the Soviets than the administrations before it. Months earlier President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defence Initiative that planned to shoot down missiles before they reached the US. On top of this, the US was in the process of deploying nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, which were close enough to strike the Soviets. Hence, there were justifiable reasons for Petrov to think the US had escalated to a nuclear attack.

The Event

Shortly after midnight, the centre’s computers reported that one intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet from the United States. Petrov decided that the warning was a mistake, and dismissed it. Petrov's suspicion that the system was malfunctioning was confirmed when no missile in fact arrived. Later on, four additional missiles were reported as incoming, and all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov suspected that the system was malfunctioning again, despite having no direct means to confirm this.

It turns out that the alarm was created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds above North Dakota and the orbits of the satellites.

Petrov’s Reasoning

There were a few reasons Petrov had for dismissing the warnings:

A first-strike nuclear attack by the US was likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches to disable any Soviet means of a counterattack

The launch detection system was new and, to him, not yet trustworthy

The warning had passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly

The ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay

Points of Failure

The system itself. It was new, and yet used in such an important capacity. There seemed to be too much reliance/assumption that it was supposed to work as intended, as there was no official back-up system used to corroborate.

The protocol in response to a missile detection. It was a protocol that left almost no room for error. Response to incoming missiles would’ve been fast and unforgiving.

Actions Taken Since

The incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the influential scientists who were responsible for it. As a result, efforts were made to keep the incident under wraps. It wasn’t until 1998 (after dissolution of the Soviet Union) that the incident was reported to the public. Hence, not much is known about actions taken by the government in response. All that is known is that they fixed the system and its bugs.

Personal Recommendations

As much better missile detection systems are in place now, my recommendations are focused on protocols rather than improving the technical part of the system.

Have multiple sources which can corroborate detection of incoming missiles. These sources should be well tested and known to be reliable (has been in place and working well for years)

Have many people monitoring the system, instead of just one.

Put in place a more forgiving protocol for dealing with detected missiles. This could include needing multiple people to consent before launching a retaliation.

Honestly, all these of these recommendations are probably already the standard across all missile detection systems. Not sure if Soviets just had a particularly bad system/protocol, or other countries have also had similar close calls.

[anvil527up]

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: Станисла́в Евгра́фович Петро́в; 7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.

On 26 September 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.[2]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[peashooter85]

That close call back in 1983

In the late 1960′s an era of the Cold War known as “detente” began, which involved an easing of Cold War tensions between the United States, NATO, and the Soviet Union. Detente, however, came to a close in the early 1980′s with the election of Ronald Reagan. In his early presidency, Reagan was very critical of the Soviet Union, even referring to it as the “evil empire” in several speeches.  When the Soviets accidentally shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, mistaking it for an American spy plane, Reagan accused the Soviets of committing an intentional act of terrorism. Combined with his anti-Soviet rhetoric, the Reagan administration ordered a massive increase in military spending and the largest American military buildup since World War II. As part of this buildup was the deployment of Pershing II ballistic missiles in Europe, a newly designed missile which can reach Soviet cities in half the time as older model missiles. Finally Reagan announced the beginning of the “Star Wars” program, a strategic defense program in which satellite based weapons would intercept and destroy ballistic missiles in space while heading toward their targets. While the Americans intended Star Wars to be an entirely defensive program, the Soviets believed it’s purpose was to neutralize the power of the Soviet arsenal, giving the US every advantage in a nuclear war.

In response, relations between the Soviet Union and United States soured and the Soviets began to prepare for a massive attack by the United States and NATO. In 1982 the Soviet Aerospace Defense Force activated its early warning system called Oko. Oko consisted of a series of 86 satellites which could detect the launch of ballistic missiles by spotting the flash and plumes of missile launches using a very sensitive infrared camera. 

At the time nobody questioned the trustworthiness and accuracy of the satellites except an officer named Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov. On September 26th, 1983 Petrov was in command of the Oko early warning system when suddenly the system computer sounded an alarm that a missile launch had occurred in the US. Petrov, calm and cool headed, dismissed the alarm as a glitch and ordered the system computer overridden. A short time later, the system computer again sounded an alarm warning of five missile launches from the US. Soviet protocol dictated that Petrov had to notify command that launches were occurring, but again Petrov dismissed the alarm as an error and reset the system computers.  For years Petrov maintained that he was certain that the warnings were false, however in a 2013 interview he finally admitted that despite his calm and cool exterior, inside he was full of doubts and scared shitless. Petrov reasoned that if the Americans were launching a first strike, it was doubtful they would do so with a handful of missiles, but rather with hundreds or thousands of missiles. To Petrov, the mere five launches didn’t make any sense.

Thank God Petrov was right, that he ignored Soviet protocol, and that he stuck to his wits. His commanders commended him for his cool reason in the face of nuclear fire and promised him an award. However he was never awarded for his actions because doing so would be an admission that the event had occurred and that there were flaws in the Oko system. As it turns out, the satellites had spotted light reflecting from high altitude clouds and mistaken them for missile launches. The incident was swept under the rug and not made public until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Lt. Col. Petrov retired early shortly after the incident. Western sources say he was forced into early retirement for his actions, but Petrov denies this, saying he retired for personal reasons after suffering an emotional breakdown. The fate of the world was on his shoulders after all. Ten years later, when his wife asked what he did that was so special, he answered, “nothing, I did nothing.”