‘Gut instinct’ told Lt Col Stanislav Petrov that apparent launch of US missiles was actually early warning system malfunction

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A Soviet officer whose cool head and quick thinking saved the world from nuclear war has died aged 77.

Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.

Red Army protocol would have been to order a retaliatory strike, but Petrov – then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel – ignored the warning, relying on a “gut instinct” that told him it was a false alert.

“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” he told the BBC’s Russian Service in 2013. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders.”

Editorial: In praise of ... Stanislav Petrov Read more

Instead of triggering a third world war, Petrov called in a malfunction in the early warning system. But even as he did so, he later admitted, he was not entirely sure he was doing the right thing.

“Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief,” he said.

It later emerged that the false alarm was the result of a satellite mistaking the reflection of the sun’s rays off the tops of clouds for a missile launch.

“We are wiser than the computers,” Petrov said in a 2010 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “We created them.”

The incident occurred at the height of the cold war, just three weeks after the Soviet army had shot down a Korean passenger jet, killing all 269 people on board.

Ronald Reagan had recently called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” and Yuri Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was convinced the Americans were plotting a surprise nuclear attack.

Petrov was never honoured by the Soviet authorities for his role in saving the world from thermonuclear conflict. He was, however, reprimanded by his authorities for failing to describe the incident correctly in the logbook that night.

His story did not become widely known until 1998, when Gen Yury Votintsev, the retired commander of Soviet missile defence, published his memoirs. In the following years, Petrov achieved worldwide recognition for his actions.

He was honoured by the Association of World Citizens at the UN headquarters in 2006 as “the man who averted a nuclear war”. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Dresden peace prize.

He was also the subject of a 2013 documentary film entitled The Man who Saved the World.

The son of a second world war fighter pilot, Petrov was born in Vladivostok on 9 September 1939. He later studied at a Soviet air force college in Kiev.

He died on 19 May in Fryazino, a Moscow suburb, where he lived alone on a state pension, but his death was only reported on Monday. No cause of death has been announced. He is survived by a son and a daughter.