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Somehow it took more than twenty years to honor a man who saved us all.

If you were alive on September 26, 1983, when I was 12 years old, you almost didn’t make it through the day. If you are too young to have lived that day, you were almost never born.

Accounts vary, as the facts of historical events often become jumbled over the years. What we believe we know for fact, if there is such a thing in history, is that there was a man in a bunker whose inaction saved the world from a full scale nuclear war. His name is Stanislav Petrov, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces.

The Soviets, whose scientists were considered extremely honorable and elite human beings, had recently put into place a new system to detect missile launches—first strike type missile launches. The system was largely untested, but with the arms race constantly escalating during the paranoid time of the Cold War, there wasn’t always time for second guessing. The Soviet Union and the United States were both desperately keen on keeping the upper hand—as well as maintaining the sickening notion of “mutually assured destruction.” MAD. The most appropriate acronym ever in all of history.

Lieutenant Petrov was in a bunker monitoring for what every Soviet feared: a US first strike. To his surprise, it happened. A missile. Another. More. A total, according to some accounts, of five nuclear warheads were dashing toward the Soviet Union.

There were protocols to follow. There were buttons to push. There were launch officers to alert—the only appropriate response to a US first strike was full scale retaliation. As hundreds of Soviet missiles filled the air, the US would have countered with everything it had.

The survivors would be the unlucky ones. Continued…