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'The man who saved the world' died and the world didn't notice Who was Stanislav Petrov?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Posted: October 1st, 2017
http://www.ajc.com/news/world/the-man-who-saved-the-world-di...
One September morning in 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old commanding officer with the Soviet Unions Air Defense Forces, saved the world from erupting into nuclear war. Petrov died on May 19 ... at his home in the Moscow suburb of Fryazino. According to the New York Times, he lived at his Fryazino home alone on a pension. How did Petrov save the world? On Sept. 26, 1983, Oko (the Soviet Unions early-warning satellite system for nuclear attack) detected that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles, all headed toward the USSR. But as the alarms went off and screens flashing the word LAUNCH lit up, Petrov, who was just a few hours into his shift as duty officer at command center Serpukhov-15, remained calm. For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock, he told The Washington Post in 1999. Petrovs gut feeling ... led him to believe the launch reports were probably false. When people start a war, they don't start it with only five missiles, he remembered thinking. He said his decision to stand down ... was at best, a 50-50 guess. And, as Wired Magazine put it in 2007, he hoped to hell he was right. That gut feeling and Petrovs calm, common-sense analysis saved the world from potential catastrophe. The satellite that signaled the false alarm had picked up the suns reflection atop the clouds, mistaking it for a missile launch. After the classified incident became public ... Petrov went on to earn the German Media Prize in 2012 (other GMP winners include Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama and Kofi Anan).
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