The Soviet Colonel who broke protocol
Forty-two years ago, a lone man saved humanity from near-certain nuclear disaster.
On September 1, 1983, a Korean Airlines flight en route to Seoul from New York was shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi jet, killing all 269 onboard because it had strayed into Soviet airspace.
Military and political tensions between the USA and USSR reached a peak. Three weeks later, on September 26, the early warning system at Soviet nuclear defense command center flagged off multiple incoming American missiles.
As per Soviet defence protocol, the on-duty officer, Lt Col Stanislav Petrov, was supposed to immediately set in motion a massive retaliatory nuclear strike on the USA & its NATO allies.
The responsibility on Petrov was mammoth. However, judging that the warnings were a result of faults in the system, Petrov did not act as per the stated protocol. Petrov told his commander that the system could be giving false information as the Soviet ground radar could not confirm a launch.
Averting a nuclear face-off
Subsequent investigation confirmed Petrov’s initial hunch, as well as other bugs that had affected the Soviet nuclear defense system.
Given the prevailing tensions between the USSR & USA, if the Soviet top leadership had been notified of the events (as was the protocol), experts felt they would have definitely green signalled a retaliatory attack, leading to an all-out nuclear war. However, thanks to Lt Col Petrov, that did not happen!
Stanislav Petrov’s story remained hidden from the world for more than three decades.It only became public knowledge in 1998 when General Yury Volintsev, the then head of Soviet nuclear defence in 1983, published his memoirs.
Stanislav Petrov retired from the army a year later. He passed away in 2017 from pneumonia.
In 2013, a Danish filmmaker, Peter Anthony, took Petrov’s story to the world through his documentary, ‘The Man Who Saved the World’. On 22 February, 2018 the film premiered in Russia at the Documentary Film Center in Moscow.
Image source: https://www.lorenzomercanti.com/projects/stanislav-petrov/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
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