The man who saved the world by not doing what he was supposed to do

It was September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet satellite early-warning system, when the alarms went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites was reporting that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

Tensions between the two countries were running high. The alarm coincided with the start of some provocative NATO military exercises, and came barely three weeks after the Russians had shot down a South Korean civilian airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace.

Petrov’s instructions were clear: if he detected missiles headed for the Soviet Union, he was to press the button that launched the counteroffensive.

“It was indeed just like in the movies,” says Petrov, a red button blinking, waiting to be pressed, except that “in the movies, Hollywood specialists and directors can stretch a little situation into half an hour. In our case, from the time I made the decision to when it was all over, it was five minutes max.”

But he decided to do nothing. He had a hunch that something was wrong. And he was right: months later, it was determined that the signals were the result of a system failure.

The start button, the one Commander Petrov was expected to press, would have set off an irreversible chain reaction in a system designed to launch a counterattack with no human intervention.

“The main computer wouldn’t ask me [what to do] — it was made so that it wouldn’t even ask. It was specially constructed in such a way that no one could affect the system’s operations.”

The only thing Petrov could do was analyze the available information and decide whether the alarm was false, or give the computer the go-ahead, following a directive he himself had written.

So why didn’t Petrov press the button?

Two ideas came to his mind:

“I just couldn’t believe that just like that, all of a sudden, someone would hurl five missiles at us. Five missiles wouldn’t wipe us out. The U.S. had not five, but a thousand missiles in battle readiness. It didn’t look like a scenario military intelligence had ever considered.”

The second thought in Petrov’s mind, one he always kept in view whenever he was on shift, was this:

“I imagined if I’d assume the responsibility for unleashing the third World War — and I said, no, I wouldn’t.”

We owe Petrov our thanks for what he did; he is an unsung hero of our time. But above all he shows us that we cannot blindly believe “what the system says”.

In the end, we are capable of thinking, and of making decisions that computers, however sophisticated they are and however well programmed, still cannot make for us.