Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Thursday, September 21st, 2017

Stanislav Petrov, Soviet officer credited with averting nuclear war, dies at 77

Author:     Harrison Smith
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     18 September 2017
 Link: Stanislav Petrov, Soviet officer credited with averting nuclear war, dies at 77
Stephan:   Doing the research for The 8 Laws of Change taught me that one moral person in the right place and acting at the right time can change the course of history in a life affirming way, altering the lives of milllions. Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience changed the history of three countries, Great Britain, India, and the U.S.  (You can click through to my Thinking Allowed interview about nonviolence to get a sense of my thinking about this. But perhaps no single individual has saved the lives of more people than Stanislav Petrov. This man should never been forgotten, and if you are building statues to replace the Confederate generals you might consider Petrov. He may be the reason you are alive.

Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant colonel for the Soviet Air Defence Forces, at his home in 2015. He was credited with correctly recognizing a false alarm while manning an early-warning missile defense system, thereby averting a Soviet retaliatory strike and nuclear war.
Credit:Pavel Golovkin/AP

When alarms began to ring and a control panel flashed in front of Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel seated in a secret bunker south of Moscow, it appeared that the world was less than 30 minutes from nuclear war.

“The siren howled,” he later said, “but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.” His chair, he said, began to feel like “a hot frying pan.”

Col. Petrov, an official with Russia’s early-warning missile system, was charged with determining whether the United States had opened intercontinental fire on the Soviet Union. Just after midnight on Sept. 26, 1983, all signs seemed to point to yes.

The satellite signal Col. Petrov received in his bunker […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

  1. sam crespi on Thursday, September 21, 2017 at 8:07 am

    Thank you for posting. Petrov’s lucidity, his decision to pause, and consider – to meditate on the situation – instead of shooting from the hip which too often defines our culture’s behavior stands apart.