According to newspaper reports, Petrov may have passed away this May since real news out of Russia is difficult to get.
You probably never heard of him until the reports of his death. I had heard of him indirectly over the years since Petrov was mentioned in some other Russian bigwig’s memoirs.
The world should be grateful to former Lt. Col. Petrov too. Because of his actions, the world didn’t end in a horrible nuclear fireball around late 1983. What happened then was a false alarm reports as a first launch by the Soviet’s newly installed detection system. Allegedly it mistook reflections off clouds as five nuclear missiles heading toward the USSR. Sounds like a pretty dumb computer. However, we got pretty close to ending the world in 1979 thanks to our setup mistaking the moon rising over the horizon for the same dilemma.
Petrov had 23 minutes to think and decide what to do as the duty officer at the Soviet’s defense command center outside Moscow. If he was wrong, the consequences were catastrophic. Do nothing. The USSR gets nailed and probably retaliates automatically. Call his superiors…and given their belligerent mood via St. Reagan’s saber rattling, a Korean jet being shutdown by the Soviet air force and America’s invasion of Grenada…Soviet leader Chernenko would’ve immediately ordered a counter-strike. Well, he applied reason and his knowledge of the new system. Firstly he thought, if the Americans want to destroy us, they’d launch hundreds, thousands of missiles, not five. Secondly, he knew the computer program was flawed and has been quoted as saying, we’re superior to machines for we made them.
He was right. There was no attack.
Sadly, Petrov’s reward for a saving the world was a reprimand by his superiors. It wasn’t over his quick thinking. It was for not following bureaucratic procedure in logging the events properly. In his defense, he said, I couldn’t log because I didn’t have a third arm while he had the phone in one and the intercom button pressed down via the other.
You can read about the rest of post-air force career through the link. He may have been a member of our enemy’s military but I think we still owe him a debt of gratitude for not given into the time period’s paranoia.