Stanislav Petrov and the 1983 False Alarm

On September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a Soviet nuclear early-warning center. The computers reported American missiles in the air.

His training said to report it immediately. Petrov decided it was a false alarm. He did not pass the warning up the chain of command. He reported a system malfunction instead.

Years later he described the moment to the BBC: "I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan." If he had been wrong, the first nuclear explosions would have happened minutes later. He said it was 23 minutes before he realized that nothing had happened.

Investigators later found that the satellites had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile engines.

His decision possibly prevented a nuclear war. It came to light only years later. Petrov died in May 2017, and the news was not widely reported until September.

Watch the short story: Stanislav Petrov and the 1983 False Alarm on Aha Lantern.

Sources: BBC News, "Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world"; Wikipedia, Stanislav Petrov.

More stories: Iran Nuclear Warning: Castle Bravo's Fallout Was Not Snow · Iran Nuclear Question: The Ski Raid on Hitler's Heavy Water · Operation Mincemeat: A Dead Man Fooled Hitler

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