Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77

By SEWELL CHAN SEPT. 18, 2017

Early on the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov helped to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.

A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he had begun 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 computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base.

“For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he later recalled. “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’”

The close call occurred during one of the tensest periods in the Cold War. Three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines commercial flight after it crossed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people on board, including a congressman from Georgia. President Ronald Reagan had rejected calls for freezing the arms race, calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” The Soviet leader, Yuri V. Andropov, was obsessed by fears of an American attack.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/stanislav-petrov-nuclear-war-dead.html

[Turbineguy]

1. I wonder if

North Korea has somebody like that.

[nycbos]

2. If they do they probably will get strapped to the next rocket launch.