[shian]

Most people become heroes for doing things. Stanislav Petrov became one through having the courage to do nothing – in the face of a potential nuclear threat.
The retired Russian Lieutenant Colonel has picked up a major humanitarian accolade, the German Media Prize, for preventing possible catastrophic all-out conflict. The previous recipients of the award include Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama.
Teetering on the brink
On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at an early-warning anti-nuclear center just outside Moscow.
The clock had just struck midnight, when a piercing warning siren began to wail.
It was less than a month after the USSR had shot down a Korean passenger jet, and Cold War tensions were at their highest for years.
Petrov’s computer showed that the United States had launched a ballistic missile towards the Soviet Union. In seconds, several more appeared.
“I didn’t even have time to think about what I was doing, or to fill out my log. I just had to make a decision on the spot,” Petrov said in an interview with RT.
Petrov’s job was to decide whether the threat was credible, and how to report it to his superiors, who’d relay the information directly to the elderly Soviet leaders.
“I was the one with the information and my reaction would determine the course of action. If I told them it was an attack, it would have been easier for them to go along with this and to act accordingly than to say otherwise. The panic would have spread like in a henhouse,” Petrov says.
Petrov thought it was strange that the United States, with its thousands of nuclear warheads, would begin an assault with just a few of them. The early detection system was also new and Petrov had little trust in it. But whatever the arguments he knew that all he really had to go on was a hunch.
“I’ll admit it, I was scared. I knew the level of responsibility at my fingertips.”
Stanislav Petrov did not report that World War III was beginning. Instead, he called his superiors and told them that this was a false alarm. When other stations did not confirm a launch, the nuclear response was called off.
Belated recognition
As it turned out the Soviet spy satellites had mistaken sunlight reflected from clouds for ballistic missiles rising from US bases.
But Petrov’s sound call was not rewarded.
He explains: “When the State Commission started looking into the reasons behind the false alarm, they encountered plenty of flaws in the early detection system. So my superiors were getting the blame and they did not want to recognize that anyone did any good, but instead chose to spread the blame.”
The entire incident was highly classified, and even Stanislav Petrov’s name was not revealed to the public until 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Since then he has been the subject of countless reports and received many awards, though primarily from abroad. In his retirement he continues to live a simple life at his country house, proud but not fixated on the events of September 26, 1983.
He says: “At first when people started telling me that these TV reports had started calling me a hero, I was surprised. I never thought of myself as one – after all, I was literally just doing my job.”

http://rt.com/news/soviet-nuclear-petrov-stanislav-221/

[MajorMattem]

Its just news like this that shows us how close we were to the brink, and the small things that people do that have massive consequences and effects on things.

If this guy had actually trusted technology like people do now, then we would all be dead by now.

[Mon]

shian posted:

He says: “At first when people started telling me that these TV reports had started calling me a hero, I was surprised. I never thought of myself as one – after all, I was literally just doing my job.”

this man gives me faith in humanity

[Jsm]

I heard about this guy years ago, great to see he is getting some sort of recognition. He might not have averted WW3, but he did make a pretty tough decision on the spot.

[Ogopogo]

It is people who made these kind of decisions that really won all of us the cold war. I think there has been a number of other officers, from both sides, that have prevented similar events in the past.

[Contag]

Jsm posted:

I heard about this guy years ago, great to see he is getting some sort of recognition. He might not have averted WW3, but he did make a pretty tough decision on the spot.

Yeah, it's speculated that the Soviet Union had an automatic (or mostly automatic) retaliation system that would be switched on when a nuclear attack might have been launched.

Which is really quite ingenious, if it works, because it allows leaders to make decisions without having to decide when to launch their arsenal, as no matter what, the other country will be turned to glass if it's a real nuclear attack.

[Pepsi-cola]

So he was the guy in from war games?

[SatansSin]

Missiles at the brim of anyone's fingers is scary.

Too show that it was close to a cold war starting.. And wondering how it would have turned out. Is unfathomable.

[Noble]

While this makes for a good story, Russia already stated that they weren't going to make a decision to start a nuclear war based on information from a single source, it would have had to have been confirmed by multiple sources. The man did not actually save the world from nuclear war.

http://www.un.int/russia/other/060119eprel.pdf

[cecilbdemodded]

Jsm posted:

I heard about this guy years ago, great to see he is getting some sort of recognition. He might not have averted WW3, but he did make a pretty tough decision on the spot.

It would have taken just one missile launch from either side to start WWIII. So the question is did he stop the Soviets from launching anything? If he did, he stopped WWIII.

I for one believe he's right in saying that, in their system, if he had passed on the judgement that the US was attacking then everyone would have just gone along with that probably until it was too late. Once the guy who is sitting right there at the controls of the early warning system says it's an attack, who is going to stick their neck out to contradict him? Based on what information?

[smurfy]

Vasili Arkhipov was another, maybe less well-known guy who may have saved the world

On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo, despite the Soviets' being informed that practice depth charges were being used.

Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, the Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second in command Arkhipov — were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch, eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted

[Noble]

cecilbdemodded posted:

It would have taken just one missile launch from either side to start WWIII. So the question is did he stop the Soviets from launching anything? If he did, he stopped WWIII.

I for one believe he's right in saying that, in their system, if he had passed on the judgement that the US was attacking then everyone would have just gone along with that probably until it was too late. Once the guy who is sitting right there at the controls of the early warning system says it's an attack, who is going to stick their neck out to contradict him? Based on what information?

The official Russian statement to the UN says

Under no circumstances a decision to use nuclear
weapons could be made or even considered in the Soviet Union (Russia) or in the United
States on the basis of data from a single source or a system. For this to happen, a
confirmation is necessary from several systems: ground-based radars, early warning
satellites, intelligence reports, etc. Therefore, even if one officer “had reported a satellite
signal about an incoming nuclear missile”, the nuclear war would have never started. Besides, one should keep in mind that both in the United States and in the Soviet Union
(Russia) the information automatically fed from satellites is directed to various
recipients, and a single hero or miscreant cannot stop it.

so it's unlikely this guy stopped anything from being launched nor would he be able to prevent his superiors from knowing about a "potential launch" by the US.

[Daniel Smith]

This guy must be the most important and underrated person in the world.

[DaCommie1]

Similar thing happened at NORAD, they had a new system that thought the moon was a thousand soviet nukes or something.

[rinoaff33]

DaCommie1 posted:

Similar thing happened at NORAD, they had a new system that thought the moon was a thousand soviet nukes or something.

That's no moon...! Oh wait, yes it is.

[ewitwins]

smurfy posted:

Vasili Arkhipov was another, maybe less well-known guy who may have saved the world

I think he's better known, I've seen History Channel episodes just on this guy.

[LifeIsGood]

My name in my Russian class is Stanislav.

Stanislav master race?

[cecilbdemodded]

Noble posted:

The official Russian statement to the UN says



so it's unlikely this guy stopped anything from being launched nor would he be able to prevent his superiors from knowing about a "potential launch" by the US.

I'll remind you that they say that NOW, 20 some years later. And it's not like they would lie or anything right?

I admit it could be true, but consider this: This was their newest early warning system, in theory this is the best system they had. If the guy running their best warning system starts telling everyone 'The Americans have launched' and they know US missiles could be impacting anytime from 15 to 30 minutes after that warning(depending on launch point), they MIGHT have felt they don't have time to wait for older systems to confirm.

One of the more dangerous aspects of the Cold War was both sides' attempts to position missiles as close to targets as possible. Why do you think we almost had a war over missiles in Cuba? Cause it would have made it impossible for us to take the time to verify a real launch. No one wanted to have their missiles destroyed on the ground.

[salty peanut v2]

that must have been a fucking nerve-wracking job

[Frost 31]

Contag posted:

Yeah, it's speculated that the Soviet Union had an automatic (or mostly automatic) retaliation system that would be switched on when a nuclear attack might have been launched.

Which is really quite ingenious, if it works, because it allows leaders to make decisions without having to decide when to launch their arsenal, as no matter what, the other country will be turned to glass if it's a real nuclear attack.

You are referring to the Dead Hand system. It was designed to launch the Soviet ICBMs if it Moscow and/or all the missile control stations had been nuked, or if the system detected sufficient evidence of nuclear detonation. Dead Hand was apparently semi-automatic in nature, as opposed to be completely automated. So it still needed (or needs) human intervention of some kind to send the final launch signal to the missile silos. Whether or not it still exists or is in use is a mystery.

For more check the wiki article, it's a pretty good read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Ha...nuclear_war%29

[Sickle]

SatansSin posted:

Too show that it was close to a cold war starting.. And wondering how it would have turned out. Is unfathomable.

I can't... I don't... What?

[HeavyGuy]

The fate of (some of) the world lay at his hands, and he managed to prevent it's destruction. Good thing he had common sense, or we may not have been discussing this today.

[Alien_23]

Another way of seeing it: If he didn't, we would be in our own live-action Fallout game.

[a dumb bear]

Wow, it's scary to think how events like this come down to a matter of seconds.

[ironman17]

Stan really saved our behinds that day, it seems.

[Squeaken]

Noble posted:

so it's unlikely this guy stopped anything from being launched nor would he be able to prevent his superiors from knowing about a "potential launch" by the US.

If I told them it was an attack, it would have been easier for them to go along with this and to act accordingly than to say otherwise. The panic would have spread like in a henhouse,” Petrov says.

This is why it was still important he made the choice he did.

[Ganerumo]

Oh hey I remember reading about this a while ago, good to know he finally got rewarded.

[timmyvos]

SatansSin posted:

Missiles at the brim of anyone's fingers is scary.

Too show that it was close to a cold war starting.. And wondering how it would have turned out. Is unfathomable.

The alternative is WOPR and we all know how that ended.

[crackberry]

Good to know that not every Russian was an ultimatum type person. The balls to say it was a false alarm AND report it to superiors is amazing.

[Uncle Bourbon]

there's a guy called stanislav in my school. this must be him!

seriously though, this is very interesting

[Garik]

Alien_23 posted:

Another way of seeing it: If he didn't, we would be in our own live-action Fallout game.

Except without humanity in general.

[Griffster26]

Reminds me of a certain song.

[Noble]

cecilbdemodded posted:

I'll remind you that they say that NOW, 20 some years later. And it's not like they would lie or anything right?

I admit it could be true, but consider this: This was their newest early warning system, in theory this is the best system they had. If the guy running their best warning system starts telling everyone 'The Americans have launched' and they know US missiles could be impacting anytime from 15 to 30 minutes after that warning(depending on launch point), they MIGHT have felt they don't have time to wait for older systems to confirm.

One of the more dangerous aspects of the Cold War was both sides' attempts to position missiles as close to targets as possible. Why do you think we almost had a war over missiles in Cuba? Cause it would have made it impossible for us to take the time to verify a real launch. No one wanted to have their missiles destroyed on the ground.

I'll give the man credit for avoiding spreading a panic, but I don't believe for a second that Russia would have started a nuclear war over a single station showing a false reading. The computer systems were often vulnerable to false readings (as the official statement says), and had it been a real launch, it would have been quickly confirmed by their satellite systems and multiple stations before the decision to launch nukes would even be considered.

Petrov later indicated the influences in this decision included: that he was informed a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start,[1] that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy, and that ground radars failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay.

The man used common sense and did his job, but I don't think there's any reason to believe that he "saved the world"

[superstepa]

crackberry posted:

Good to know that not every Russian was an ultimatum type person. The balls to say it was a false alarm AND report it to superiors is amazing.

Who said that every Russian is an ultimatum type person?