Petrov

He was called “the man who saved the world”, and you probably never heard of him. I hadn’t, until I saw a story about his death on the Evening News. This morning, I read his obituary. Stanislav Petrov is someone everyone should know about because without him, the world would be a very different place. And many of us would not be here today. The obit written by Sewell Chan in the New York Times reads like a doomsday novel that would be made into a movie starring some big name Hollywood superstar. Petrov was a 44 year old Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces on September 26, 1983, when he went on duty at a secret command center outside Moscow. It was there that the Soviet military monitored its early warning satellites over the United States to determine if we launched nuclear missiles. Suddenly alarms went off. Chan writes, “Computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base.” “For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock, “he (Petrov) later recalled. We needed to understand, “What’s next?”.

This was at the height of the Cold War. The Soviets had recently shot down a Korean Air Lines commercial jet after it strayed into their airspace, killing 269 people. President Reagan was calling the Soviet regime, “the evil empire”. Petrov was the point man who had the responsibility of alerting his superiors that the Americans had launched a nuclear attack on his country, and the Soviets would have to respond. Chan tells us, “After five nerve-racking minutes-electronic maps and screens were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, trying to absorb streams of information-Colonel Petrov decided that the launch reports were probably a false alarm.” Later, Petrov said he took a “50-50” guess. He didn’t totally trust the less than reliable early warning system and he thought if it was a real attack, the US would have launched more than five missiles. He made this decision in minutes under almost unbearable tension and pressure. Petrov was right. It was false alarm. It was a malfunction of the system caused by a satellite mistaking the sun’s reflection off of some clouds for a missile launch. At first hailed for his action, Petrov was later reprimanded for not recording everything in his log book.

Chan’s obit goes on to say Petrov retired from the military the next year. He took an engineering job, at the institute that made the early warning system that failed on that fateful morning. Nothing more was heard about Petrov, until the Soviet commander of the missile defense system wrote a book. Petrov got some notoriety and awards, and is the subject of a documentary. His son reported that Petrov died back in May of pneumonia living alone on a pension. He was 77.

The story of Stanislav Petrov seems very relevant today when the threat of nuclear war is in the news everyday. We have an unstable rogue nation in North Korea led by the unpredictable and seemingly unstable Kim Jong Un threatening to launch nuclear missiles at the United States. And we have an unpredictable, and some would say, unstable president who likes to throw around threats of his own including his redundant threat today at the United Nations to “totally destroy” North Korea if it goes too far. This is a time for steady hands and cool heads. We didn’t hear this kind of language from President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis when we were a lot close to nuclear war. Kennedy was weary and suspicious of the generals who wanted to launch an attack on those Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Trump has surrounded himself with generals who have been to war. Let’s hope they have learned the lessons of history. They could take a lesson from the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov during those terrible moments years ago.