After watching a documentary on the chap Vasili Arkhipov after seeing that film K-19, and heard tell of another much lesser known nuclear war scare that was even more secretive and dangerous then the Cuban missile crisis. Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of a newly installed early warning radar system and at a particularly tense moment in the Cold War.
The Soviets had recently killed 260 innocent civilians when they mistakenly shot down a Korean airliner over Soviet airspace, and N.AT.O were performing military exercises as a show of force in response to this. Soviet high command were shitting themselves at the prospect on all out nuclear war and had their finger firmly hovering over the big red button. Then on 26 September 1983, Petrov’s radar base picked up an American launch of a solitary missile and his job was to inform high command that a launch had occurred in order that a retaliatory strike could be launched.
Petrov hesitated though, and not fully trusting the new system decided that it must have been a kink in the new system and duly declared a false alarm. No sooner though had Petrov declared this, when the system picked up another 4 incoming missiles. Petrov refused to believe that the Americans would launch so few missiles given the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that prevailed at the time and again put this down to a computer malfunction. This was unbelievable pressure given that if he was wrong millions of his countrymen would die.
After a tense few hours though, he was proved right and the system was faulty and his common sense, courage and humanity possibly prevented all out nuclear war, when a weaker man would have just passed the buck up the line and blindly followed orders. He has never received damn all recognition for this though, so he gets my vote for the most underrated individual from history for saving the world from utter incineration. Anyone think of any other underrated legends like Stanislav from history?
