Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77
A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he was a few hours into his shift as the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret
command center outside Moscow where the Soviet military monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States, when alarms went off.
The exercise, alongside the arrival in Europe of Pershing II nuclear missiles, led some in the Soviet leadership to believe
that the United States was using it as a cover for war; the Soviets placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert.
After five nerve-racking minutes — electronic maps
and screens were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, trying to absorb streams of incoming information — Colonel Petrov decided that the launch reports were probably a false alarm.
I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”
As the tension in the command center rose — as many as 200 pairs of eyes were trained
on Colonel Petrov — he made the decision to report the alert as a system malfunction.
