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'I Was Just Doing My Job': Soviet Officer Who Averted Nuclear War Dies at Age 77
A Soviet officer who prevented a nuclear crisis between the US and the USSR and possible World War III in the 1980s has quietly passed away. He was 77. In 2010 RT spoke to Stanislav Petrov, who never considered himself a hero. We look at the life of the man who saved the world.
A decision that Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov once took went down in history as one that stopped the Cold War from turning into nuclear Armageddon, largely thanks to Karl Schumacher, a political activist from Germany who helped the news of his heroism first reach a western audience nearly two decades ago.
On September 7, Schumacher, who kept in touch with Petrov in the intervening years, phoned him to wish him a happy birthday, but instead learned from Petrov's son, Dmitry, that the retired officer had died on May 19 in his home in a small town near Moscow.
On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was on duty in charge of an early warning radar system in a bunker near Moscow, when just past midnight he saw the radar screen showing a single missile inbound from the United States and headed toward the Soviet Union.
"When I first saw the alert message, I got up from my chair. All my subordinates were confused, so I started shouting orders at them to avoid panic. I knew my decision would have a lot of consequences," Petrov recalled of that fateful night in an interview with RT in 2010.
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It was later revealed that what the Soviet satellites took for missiles launch was sunlight reflected from clouds.
Many of us feel that one person can't make a real difference in the world. Stanislov Petrov did.
R.I.P. Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world
The Guardian and other news sources report, that Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov has died, age 77.
Petrov has become (not very) famous, because in 1983 his quick decision making averted a possible nuclear war.
I think that we, humans, are bad at recognizing significant events that led to everything continuing as normal..
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:27PM
I'm not going to accept "they killed each other" explanations for the Fermi paradox until we start finding alien ruins, spying nuclear fallout in exoplanet atmospheres, or something else along those lines.
IANAAP (astrophysicist), but I think you're expecting too much here. Surely a civilization could destroy themselves in nuclear warfare without us seeing the nuclear fallout: the fallout is of course extremely hard to detect from this distance (we can barely even detect Earth-size planets still), there doesn't really need to be *that* much of it to reduce their civilization back to pre-industrial levels (i.e., they don't have to completely destroy themselves, they just have to screw up their civilization enough so that they can't achieve significant spaceflight), and even if they completely destroy themselves, the nuclear event will last a relatively short amount of time, so the likelihood that we'll see the fallout is very low, and instead we're more likely to see worlds that had a war eons in the past, and now they're either lifeless or they have some life but not any intelligent life. Finding alien ruins is the only really reliable way IMO to figure out the Fermi Paradox, but we're not going to find any ruins until we actually start exploring exoplanets, and we're nowhere near achieving that; we have 2 probes launched 40 years ago that have just barely gotten out of the Solar System, and it'll take 40,000 years for them to get to another star system. If we want to explore other systems, we need a level of propulsion and communications and automation technology beyond what we have now, but there are some interesting [wikipedia.org] ideas [wikipedia.org] that have been proposed that might be doable in the next few decades if we really wanted to.