In a discussion of ‘who probably saved the most people in history’ the same handful of tinkerers tend to come up every time. Norman Borlaug. Edward Jenner. Alexander Fleming. Whoever invented doggy style.
But let’s talk about someone who saved untold millions not with inventions or discoveries, but by disobeying orders.
Today’s Moment of Science… the reluctant hero, Stanislav Petrov.
A few months after I was born in 1983, the Cold War was getting annoyingly close to becoming a hot one. The US and the USSR had gone from a nuclear dickwaving contest to a nuclear game of chicken. Ever since the bitter rivals had tamed the atom, they were also both armed to the teeth with highly blasty radioactive bullshit. Able Archer, a NATO exercise conducted in May of that year designed to simulate a nuclear war with the USSR, made the Soviets think “perhaps it would be wise to prepare for battle.”
The US, along with NATO allies, had been playing a military version of “I am not touching you” only instead of a five year old sticking their finger in your face, they had bombers teasing Soviet radar. With tensions growing continually higher, on September 1st, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air flight 007 when it flew into Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard perished, including a US congressman.
Things were a smidge beyond being settled with a chit chat.
On the 26th of September, 1983, the unimaginable happened.
Alarms rang out from the Oko nuclear early warning system at Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’s posting. It was a warning that, no fucking kidding, there’s no fucking chance they were wrong, those fucking Americans had finally fucking done it. After these years of proxy wars and reports of progressively more horrifying weapons tests, this was it.
First there was one nuclear missile incoming, then another. Then eventually five. The computer’s readings were clear; there was no ambiguity, nuclear missiles had been launched, and their approach was imminent.
All Petrov had to do was follow orders and call up the chain of command that this was happening. Nuclear retaliation from the USSR would almost certainly ensue.
“One wrong decision, and everything turns to dust,” Stanislav would say later in life.
He wasn’t a computer following an algorithm, though. He was in charge of making the call that night for good reason. Petrov pieced together that an American attack wouldn’t have been just a handful of missiles. Even back in the 1980s, the US has always been a bit of a ‘shock and awe’ bunch. The computer system was quite new without a record of reliability. Furthermore, nobody could find the slightest hint of these missiles on radar.
Petrov wouldn’t budge, and stuck to his guns that it was a false alarm, knowing he was risking devastation to his own country. In doing so, he likely stopped all out nuclear war that day.
Years later, he said he was never really sure that he was making the right call in the moment. He suspected his civilian training may have given him what he needed to question the validity of the computer alarms, while his career military colleagues who challenged his decisions would likely have followed protocol.
The military took umbrage with him documenting the event incorrectly. So.
In 1998, we would come to know about the man who stopped the world from going off its axis in a control room in the USSR. In the fifteen years that had passed, his wife died of cancer, and he’d suffered a mental breakdown. He was finally recognized for his heroism in the final decades of his life, passing away in 2017.
He would say in speeches and when receiving countless awards, “I am not a hero, I was just at the right place at the right time,” and often insisted it could have been anyone else who made that decision to call it in as a false alarm. It’s just not true though. Some may have seized any chance to launch a war on their enemies, even knowing the inevitable fallout of mutually assured destruction for their own citizens. Some may have simply followed orders.
Stanislav Petrov was at the right place at the right time to be a hero, true. But at that place and time, the hero the world needed was Stanislav Petrov.
This has been your Daily Moment of Science, wondering how much different my young life and all of our lives would have been if someone else was working Petrov’s shift that night.
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