The man who saved my life

Few people have heard of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislava Petrov. He was a system engineer assigned to Servikov-15, a command-and-control bunker outside Moscow that housed the Soviet Union’s brand-new early warning system for detecting Western ICBM launches. I learned this week that this man potentially saved my life and the lives of countless millions in September 1983.

I was living in Upstate New York, in the city of Syracuse, as an exchange student at the time. As I’ve previously posted, 1983 was a year of heightened Cold War tension. President Reagan had called the Soviet Union an evil empire in March. He’d also announced the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), better known as ‘Star Wars’, in the same month.

Then, on 1 September 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighter jets, resulting in the loss of 269 lives. The plane had strayed into a region filled with Soviet naval bases, which months earlier had been subject to mock attacks by the US Navy during FleetEx 83, a huge maritime training exercise involving three aircraft carrier battle groups.

So, how did Petrov save my life? On 26 September, alarm bells started ringing inside Servikov-15 shortly after midnight. The early warning system had detected the launch of an American Minuteman ICBM, which was heading straight for the Soviet Union. Petrov determined the warning a false alarm as ground radar hadn’t detected a launch. Then, soon after, the system detected another four launches. Petrov calmly decided to ignore standard protocols and declared this another false alarm.

Petrov didn’t normally run the control centre. A colleague had called in sick that night, and he offered to stand in. As luck would have it, Petrov knew the new system intimately. He was conscious of its shortcomings and felt strongly that it had been rushed into service. As a result, when alarms began ringing, he was hesitant to accept their data.

Petrov wisely concluded that a five-missile attack made no sense. Training scenarios always assumed a first strike consisting of hundreds, possibly thousands, of missiles. He saw no logic for the reported launches. Thanks to his in-depth knowledge of the system and conflicting information from other sources, he prudently concluded the system had suffered a computer glitch. He showed extraordinary presence of mind amid pandemonium.

Months later, it was confirmed that an early warning satellite had picked up the flare of sunlight glinting off clouds. Had Petrov simply followed orders, reported the attack without caveats and encouraged a pre-emptive counterattack, a devastating nuclear war would have started two days before my eighteenth birthday. Upstate New York contained several first strike targets. It was also due east of the jet-stream passing over the ICBM fields of North Dakota. As a result, Syracuse would have been smothered in deadly radioactive fallout. 

I’ve always thought that Australia and New Zealand were the perfect place to hunker down after a nuclear holocaust. How ironic, then, that I was living in the USA when the world came closest to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union years later that we learned of Petrov’s actions that September night.

I've illustrated this post with photos I took during a private tour of the Titan Missile Museum outside Tucson, Arizona. Garry and I visited this extraordinary facility in September 2011.