You owe your life to Stanislav Petrov

Stanislav Petrov, the unassuming man who saved the world.

You’ve probably never heard of him, but the odds are that you owe your continued existence to Stanislav Petrov.  He saved the world.  And he did it by (1) thinking, and (2) doing nothing.

It was the depths of the Cold War and tensions were running high between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  About three weeks earlier, on September 1, 1983, the Soviets had mistakenly shot down a Korean passenger plane (KAL Flight 007), killing all 269 people on board including an American politician.

Petrov, a lieutenant colonel with the Soviet military, was in charge of monitoring Soviet satellites watching for American military aggression.  On September 23, 1983, while working a double shift, Petrov’s monitoring station went red.  The Americans had fired missiles at the Soviet Union.

Protocol stated that Petrov was to push a single red button that would launch a counter-offensive, thereby initiating a full-scale nuclear war.  Despite the pressure of the situation, his position and the expectations of those in the bunker with him, Petrov did nothing, reasoning that the “attack” did not make sense.

He was correct.  It was a false alarm.  Yet, the fate of the world had been held in one man’s hands for those few minutes.

And he was covering another officer’s shift.

(Read more about the situation on Petrov’s wikipedia entry.  You probably should, as this post is a bit simplified.)