Soviet officer saved the world from thermonuclear death

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

On February 24 last year at the famous German resort of Baden-Baden took place the already traditional ceremony of presenting the very prestigious award of the German media for 2011. This time the prize was awarded to the former Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov.

Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov received the award from German journalists for the fact that back in 1983 he alone saved the world from a global nuclear apocalypse. It was his endurance, cool head, ability to analyze and male courage that saved humanity from a global nuclear catastrophe.

The sky in nuclear clouds

In fact, the modern world, for many years living practically on a minefield of nuclear confrontation between two superpowers - Russia and the United States, several times stood on the very brink of a global nuclear apocalypse. The most famous episode of this kind is, of course, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis, when in 1962, in response to the deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey by the United States capable of covering Moscow, we deployed the same missiles in Cuba.

As a result, in October 1962, the fingers of both then US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were already lying on the buttons for launching nuclear missiles. The world froze in anticipation, which could very well be the last. But it was only by a miracle that a nuclear war was avoided. On September 1, 1983, a Soviet Su-15 fighter jet shot down a Korean Boeing 747 with 269 people on board. For several days, the Soviet leaders remained silent, and then announced that the Boeing grossly violated the airspace of the USSR, did not respond to inquiries, and generally carried out a reconnaissance flight on behalf of the CIA. The real scandal erupted when, at a UN meeting dedicated to the incident, delegates listened in horror to the tape of the fighter pilot's conversations, intercepted and recorded by the Japanese National Defense Directorate.

After that, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR Andrei Gromyko, as they say, had nothing to cover, and he simply declared: “The Soviet territory, the borders of the Soviet Union are sacred. Regardless of who resorts to provocations of this kind, he should know that he will bear the full burden of responsibility for such actions. The minister really had no choice - the USSR never apologized under any circumstances. But after that, the world literally hated our country.

Attention! "Minutemans" are flying at us

And now imagine that it is in such super-stressed conditions, literally four weeks after the tragedy with the Korean passenger airliner, in a situation when the whole world is furiously spitting towards the USSR, and our General Staff quite realistically admits the possibility of a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, the following happens State of emergency.

Lieutenant Colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Stanislav Petrov took over duty at the command post of the Serpukhov-15 missile attack warning system on September 25, 1983. On the night of September 26, the lieutenant colonel received a signal from our automatic warning system for nuclear missile strikes that five Minuteman class ICBMs had been launched from US territory across the USSR. Each such missile carries ten nuclear warheads. That is, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov learned that 50 nuclear bombs were thrown at his country, each of which is aimed at some Soviet city.

According to the charter, Petrov was obliged to immediately report the situation to the country's top leadership - that is, to Yuri Andropov. What consequences would this lead to? Of course, Petrov personally did not have the opportunity to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike and thereby start a war. But the information that went to the very top, to Andropov, and even in conditions of not just time pressure, but literally minutes to make a decision, could cause a completely unpredictable reaction. Let me remind you again that a little less than four weeks have passed since the Boeing tragedy, Gromyko had just made his sensational statement to the UN and all NATO countries, like the whole world, were extremely angry with the USSR. Therefore, one can only marvel at the restraint, wisdom and composure of the lieutenant colonel, who is faced with the need to make a truly global decision on a global scale. Stanislav Petrov analyzed the situation in a matter of seconds. And in the end he decided that there was no real danger - the system probably malfunctioned. This decision was made on the basis that it would be illogical to launch only a few missiles, and moreover from one point. “If the Americans decided to launch a nuclear missile strike, it would surely have been a very massive attack, and not a few single launches,” Petrov said later. Later it turned out that the lieutenant colonel was completely right - there was an error in the recently put into service the missile detection system. She reacted to the glare from the high clouds, mistaking them for the fiery trail of a rocket.

The award has found a hero

Subsequently, after the declassification of this whole story, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov said that at first it was about the fact that he would be awarded - everyone understood that the man had actually saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe. But then, as usual, a government commission was created to "investigate the incident." And it included those through whose fault the early missile detection system was put into service. And to reward them with the lieutenant colonel and confess that their "iron" almost started a nuclear war - meant to sign their own catastrophic blunders and imperfections. Therefore, they did what they often did in those years. Everything was classified, no one was awarded, but no one was punished. Stanislav Petrov was allowed to serve quietly and was honorably dismissed.

In 2006, the American Association of World Citizens presented Petrov with an award with the inscription "The Man Who Prevented Nuclear War." But the Russian leadership was extremely wary of this fact: they say, Petrov alone could neither prevent nor start anything - his command post "Serpukhov-15" was one of many in the whole network of the air defense system.