The 5 Minute Decision that Saved the World in 1983

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Ever heard of Stanislav Petrov?

Prob­a­bly not—but you may very well owe him your life.

Petrov, a for­mer mem­ber of the Soviet mil­i­tary, didn’t actu­ally do any­thing but that’s pre­cisely the point.

In 1983, Petrov held a very impor­tant sta­tion: As lieu­tenant colonel, he was in charge of mon­i­tor­ing the Soviet Union’s satel­lites over the United States, and watch­ing for any sign of unau­tho­rized mil­i­tary action.
This was the Cold War era, and sus­pi­cions were high; on Sep­tem­ber 1, the Soviet Union had mis­tak­enly shot down a Korean air­craft it had believed to be a mil­i­tary plane, killing 269 civil­ians, includ­ing an Amer­i­can Con­gress­man. The Soviet Union believed that the United States might launch a mis­sile attack at any moment, and that they would be forced to respond with their own arse­nal of nuclear weapons.

Sev­eral weeks after the air­plane dis­as­ter, on Sep­tem­ber 23, another offi­cer called in sick, so Petrov was stuck work­ing a dou­ble shift at a secret bunker, mon­i­tor­ing satel­lite activ­ity, when “sud­denly the screen in front of me turned bright red,” Petrov told BBC News. “An alarm went off. It was pierc­ing, loud enough to raise a dead man from his grave.”

Accord­ing to the sys­tem, the United States had launched five mis­siles, which were rapidly head­ing into Soviet ter­ri­tory. The U.S.S.R. was under attack.

All Petrov had to do was push the flash­ing red but­ton on the desk in front of him, and the Sovi­ets would retal­i­ate with their own bat­tery of mis­siles, launch­ing a full-scale nuclear war. “For fif­teen sec­onds, we were in a state of shock,” he told The Wash­ing­ton Post. “We needed to under­stand, what’s next?”

Though the bunker atmos­phere was chaotic, Petrov, who had trained as a sci­en­tist, took the time to ana­lyze the data care­fully before mak­ing his deci­sion. He real­ized that, if the U.S. did attack, they would be unlikely to launch a mere five mis­siles at once. And when he stud­ied the system’s ground-based radar, he could see no evi­dence of oncom­ing missiles.

He still couldn’t say for sure what was going on, but “I had a funny feel­ing in my gut,” he told The Post. “I didn’t want to make a mis­take. I made a deci­sion, and that was it.”

Luck­ily for all of us, he decided not to push that but­ton. Later, his instincts were proven right—the mal­func­tion­ing sys­tem had given him a false alarm, and the U.S. had not deployed any mis­siles. Thanks to Petrov’s cool head, nuclear war had been nar­rowly averted, and mil­lions of lives were saved.

Unfor­tu­nately, Petrov didn’t exactly receive a heroic reward from the Soviet mil­i­tary: Embar­rassed by their own mis­takes, and angry at Petrov for break­ing mil­i­tary pro­to­col, they forced him into early retire­ment with a pen­sion of $200 a month. Petrov’s brave act was kept secret from the out­side world until the 1998 pub­li­ca­tion of a book by one of Petrov’s fel­low offi­cers, who wit­nessed his courage on that ter­ri­fy­ing night.

Since the book’s pub­li­ca­tion, Petrov has been hon­ored by the United Nations and pre­sented with a World Cit­i­zen Award, and there has been talk of giv­ing him the Nobel Prize. Still, the hum­ble Russ­ian sci­en­tist plays down his role in avert­ing a nuclear cri­sis: “I was sim­ply the right per­son in the right time, that was all,” he said in the upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary, The Red But­ton and the Man Who Saved the World.

We’ve got to dis­agree with him. Sure, he may have done noth­ing but in this case, it might just be the hard­est thing to do.

By Kathryn Hawkins for Gimundo, the site for good news, served daily.