The false alarm that almost destroyed the earth

On 26 September 1983, at the height of the Cold War, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, was sitting in his command post at Serpukhov-15, in the village of Kurilovo in the Kaluga oblast, around 100km south of Moscow.

Petrov was in charge of monitoring the Cosmos 1382 network of Oko-type early warning satellites designed to detect any intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from the USA. The satellites scanned the horizon, studying the appearance of infrared signatures caused by the release of energy when missiles took off.

Around midnight that day, the system's sirens went off. This very serious alarm indicated that a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile had been fired from Malmstrom Air Force Base in the United States. Petrov was petrified, the Cold War was in full swing, he had no right to react too slowly, or to make a mistake... He didn't have time to fully consider the different options when the alert worsened, indicating four more missile reports, making a total of five missiles.

Petrov could have warned the military command and a response would have followed, but he did not pass the alert up the chain of command. On the other hand, Petrov felt that five missiles was not a credible attack strategy, especially as the satellite radar operators had not confirmed these launches. Petrov decided to point out that the Oko system, still very young and little tested, was defective. It was a difficult decision to make given the context at the time. President Ronald Reagan had described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and just three weeks before the incident, the destruction of commercial flight 007 Korean Air Lines from Seoul to New York by a Soviet interceptor had further damaged relations. But Petrov had a decisive advantage: as an algorithmic engineer, he knew very well how the computer surveillance programme worked. "A computer can never be more intelligent than the person who created it," he told the Russian newspaper Gazeta. "I took the liberty of not believing the system, because I am a person, not a computer". According to Petrov, another officer did not hesitate to sound the alarm.

It turned out to be a false alarm! Probably due to the position of the sun and clouds, sunlight had been reflected off the satellite's infrared sensors, triggering several false missile alerts!

The incident led the Soviet Union to add a complementary geostationary satellite system to corroborate any indications of missile launches from the United States. Clearly, for such a critical system, a second source of confirmation was not superfluous.

Stanislav Petrov is a true hero whose foresight prevented the mutual destruction of the USA and the USSR. He pointed out that the investigators who analysed the false alarm sought to make him a scapegoat. The State Commission accused him of not having recorded the incident in the newspaper during the incident or afterwards (although this is strictly forbidden). He said: "Then I had a really hard time. They started looking for any mistakes I might have made, and those who want to find mistakes will certainly end up finding them. Colonel General Yuri Votintsev reprimanded me and then, 10 years later, he apologised in the press (in the Pravda newspaper in 1993)". When the Pravda journalist rang his doorbell and told his wife "Oh, your husband saved the world from nuclear war", Petrov reportedly slammed the door and told his wife that the journalist had lied out of "fear of being tested"!

A year after the incident, he retired from the army because he considered his job to be thankless, stressful and with professional relations that were sometimes execrable. He then worked for 13 years at the institute that created the faulty system, as a senior engineer, before having to resign because his wife was ill with brain cancer and there was no one to look after her. When she died in 1997, he found himself alone, with no job and no support, unable to return to work at the institute because he felt obsolete after his long absence.

He died in his flat in Friazino on 19 May 2017 at the age of 77 following an illness. However, his death did not become public knowledge until September 2017. In 2014, Peter Anthony, a Danish filmmaker, made a documentary about Petrov entitled "The Man Who Saved the World". Anthony will point out that Petrov wasn't supposed to be there that day, but another officer was ill so Stanislav had to take over. When asked what could make the world a better place, he replied: "We have to wipe the slate clean, I'm tired of living in this atmosphere of permanent mistrust and hostility, why can't our countries get along, it's absurd! [...] In a global atomic war, no one will win, no one!

This story, now almost forgotten, reminds us of the extent to which the antagonism of the major military powers possessing nuclear weapons is capable in an instant of transforming the earth into a huge ball of fire. At a time when the rash words of some are pushing for the use of nuclear bombs, it is important to understand the fragility of our world, and to fight the madness of those who are pushing this world beyond its point of equilibrium, undoubtedly leading to the end of humanity.