An aerial photo of the test site for the first atomic bomb in history in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico in the summer of 1945 (AP Photo, File)
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov decided to first warn his superiors about the possible launch of some American nuclear missiles: fortunately
On the night of September 25th to 26th, 1983, 40 years ago, 44-year-old Soviet lieutenant and engineer Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a military base south of Moscow. His job was to monitor the activity of a Soviet warning system designed to detect possible US launches of nuclear missiles. At some point, shortly after midnight, the system began to ring: according to protocol, Petrov should have immediately notified his superiors, who should have carried out the counterattack.
After nearly a decade in which tensions between the two superpowers had subsided, the Cold War had returned to a period of more open hostilities for several years. The alert level was therefore high, but Petrov decided to wait for further confirmation rather than immediately relaying the alert to his superiors. The confirmations were not received: There was a malfunction in the system that led to a false alarm. If the Soviet Union had counterattacked, the situation would have escalated very quickly and possibly become a nuclear conflict. That night’s episode went down in history as the Accident of the Autumnal Equinox, and Petrov is sometimes referred to as “the man who saved the world” due to his caution, which is also the title of a Danish documentary film dedicated to him in 2015.
The alarm system at the center of the incident was called Oko: it was developed starting in the 1970s and was designed as an early warning program to respond in a timely manner to possible attacks. The system consisted of a few satellites positioned in orbit with radars capable of detecting rocket launches from specific observation points. The Oko system control center was located near Kurilovo, south of Moscow, in a bunker at the Serpukhov-15 military base.
On the night of September 25-26, Petrov was in charge, who knew the Oko system very well and had to monitor the signals being sent and warn the military leadership of an impending missile attack against the Soviet Union. At this point, it was very likely that the Soviet Union would immediately counterattack in the event of an attack: in 1983, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were particularly high, also due to a number of episodes in previous years.
These were the years in which the Soviet Union and NATO, the military alliance to which some Western countries belong, conducted difficult negotiations that only in 1987 led to the INF Treaty (“Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty”), an agreement led to the fact that neither country could have a specific type of nuclear missile. The treaty was concluded following mutual deployments of nuclear weapons in various parts of Eastern Europe between 1977 and 1983: in 1983 the Soviet Union broke off ongoing negotiations, which were resumed two years later in response to the United States’ deployment of a number of missiles.
1983 was also the year of Exercise Able Archer 83, conducted by NATO and mistaken by the Soviet Union for an attempted attack: this episode is considered one of the moments when we came closest to nuclear war.
Shortly after midnight, several sirens went off in the Oko control center and the word “LAUNCH” appeared on one of the screens: signaling the departure of an ICBM and four others immediately after from a military base in Malmstrom, Montana. The Russian base’s duty personnel were alarmed, but according to some reconstructions, the signal was also received with a certain degree of skepticism: partly because five missiles seemed too few to trigger a nuclear collision between the two superpowers, partly because Petrov, the Da he Having participated in the development of the Oko system software, he knew that errors and disruptions could occur.
Thirty years after that episode, Petrov told the BBC that for some reason he couldn’t explain at the time, he didn’t feel like notifying his superiors immediately. There were no formal rules as to when this should be done, but obviously every second of delay could have huge consequences in the event of an attack: “I just had to pick up the phone to activate the direct connection to our superiors, but I couldn’t move . I felt like I was sitting on a hot pan.
On other occasions, Petrov spoke of the extreme stress of those moments when he had only a few minutes to make a decision with potentially enormous consequences, while the screen flashed, sirens wailed and the other plant operators waited for instructions to proceed.
There are varying reports about what exactly happened in the moments after the alarm. It seems that Petrov tried to restart the system, but after a few minutes the alarm stopped. Meanwhile, other Soviet radars stationed on the ground rather than in orbit reported no missiles. About twenty minutes later, Petrov received confirmation that the United States had not fired any missiles and that if he had sent the alarm it would have triggered a series of operations that could have led to nuclear war.
Initially, Petrov was praised for how he handled the situation, but things changed soon after: he was subjected to extensive interrogations by the Soviet authorities, the legitimacy of his decisions was questioned, and he never received any recognition for making one had effectively avoided nuclear confrontation. It appears that Oko’s malfunction was due to a special orientation of sunlight reflected from the clouds and satellites in orbit, which would have triggered the alarm even without rockets.
– Also read: What happens in the first moments of a nuclear bomb being dropped?
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