Retro Raunch Revisit

H A P P Y  B I R T H D A Y  T O
SEP 26, 1983: In Russia, air force officer Stanislav Petrov identifies a report of an incoming nuclear missile as a computer error instead of an actual American strike against the USSR thus preventing nuclear war. The false alarm had shown on the Soviet Air Defense early warning system as a launch of 5 warheads. After waiting for corroborating evidence which never came, instead of sending information up the chain of command, he had 30min. to decide if the danger was real and judged instead it was a mistake. Whether one hell of a lucky guess or professional calculated conclusion, Petrov's action was massively nerve-rackinging as a retaliatory Russian missile strike against the USA would have certainly been World War III pitting NATO against the Warsaw Pact with simultaneous nuclear launches. The incident came just 3 weeks after a military jet wrongly shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 for straying into Soviet airspace. All 269 on board were killed and the disaster brought scathing international scorn. Petrov was intensely questioned by his superiors and although his judgment was deemed correct & even praised with the promise of a reward, he was still reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork(!) and with some viewing his action as disobeying orders & violation of military protocol. While he wasn't punished, it is widely viewed that his reassignment to a lesser post and early retirement was to cover up Russian embarrassment over the failure of its scientists, and he later suffered a nervous breakdown. With the government known for its severe distrust of American leaders, Petrov stated he relied more on his civilian training than he did on paranoia with KGB intelligence later confirming that other officers would have taken the immediate course of launching in reprisal. Petrov's risky call resembled a surreal premise-reversal of the Oct 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (of which he has been compared to Vasily Arkhipov, a Soviet Naval officer who refused to launch a nuclear torpedo from a submarine during the Crisis), and perhaps more bizarrely of the movies 'Dr. Strangelove' and 'Fail Safe' both from 1964. Investigation of the Russian warning system later determined that the radar computer had indeed malfunctioned, and that the further original detection had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds that gave erroneous satellite readings. The story began to leak in the early 1990's after the publishing of memoirs from a former Soviet missile-defense Commander, and then to international media in 1998. In Jan 2006, Petrov was honored by the United Nations and met with anchorman Walter Cronkite. In 2011 and 2013, he was the subject of documentaries [with 2013's 'The Man Who Saved the World' that was still being nominated & winning awards in film festivals into 2016]. He died in May 2017.