Stanislav Petrov in Dresden in 2013, before he was presented with the Dresden Peace Prize (Picture: Oliver Killig)

Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world, has passed away quietly and without fanfare at the age of 77.

Petrov was a Soviet officer who averted a nuclear crisis between the US and the USSR in 1983.

Next week is the 34th anniversary of the day he prevented the Soviet Union from firing nuclear missiles at the US – thus preventing total nuclear annhilation.

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Although his death has just come to light, Petrov actually died on May 19.


The public only learned of his death because Karl Schumacher, a German political activist, had phoned Petrov to wish him a happy birthday on September 7.



But when he got through he was told by Petrov’s son Dmitri that he had passed away on May 19, in his home in Fryazno, a Moscow suburb where he lived alone on a pension.

A cause of death was not announced.

How Colonel Petrov stopped a nuclear war

The colonel was born Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 7, 1939, near Vladivostok in Russia’s far-east.

He studied at Kiev Higher Engineering Radio-Technical College of the Soviet Air Force, before joining the Air Defence Forces for the USSR.

Petrov quickly rose through the ranks, and in the early 1970s, he was assigned to the then-brand new early-warning system.

On September 26, 1983, Petrov was on duty in charge of an early warning radar system in a bunker near Moscow.

Just after midnight, the radar screen started showing that a single missile had been launched in the US and was heading towards the USSR.

Colonel Petrov at home in 2004 (Picture: Getty Images)

As Petrov tried to stop some 200 subordinates from panicking, the radar system showed that four more missiles had been launched – with giant blood-red letters appearing on the screen saying START.

From that moment, there was only half an hour for the Kremlin to decide whether to push the red button and retaliate. Petrov only had 15 minutes to determine whether the threat was real, or whether it was a false alarm.

‘There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike,’ he told the BBC years later.

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‘But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time, that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay.

‘All I had to do was to reach for the phone, to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.’

However, he managed to remain calm in the face of intense pressure, and remembered what he had been taught about the US – that in a real attack, they would launch an all-out offensive.

With that in mind, he told his superiors that the alarm must have been caused by a system malfunction.

‘I had a funny feeling in my gut,’ he later told The Washington Post. ‘I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.’

Colonel Petrov remained incredibly modest about his heroic act (Picture: Oliver Killig)

It later transpired that he was correct. What Soviet satellites had registered as missiles were actually rays of sunlight reflected on the clouds.



Petrov received no praise at the time though. Instead, he was told off for making a mistake in his logbook, and his superiors were blamed for the system’s malfunction.

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The delay in announcing Petrov’s death is somewhat fitting for a man whose incredible achievement went unacknowledged for so long.

Petrov’s action that day was kept secret as highly classified for more than 10 years.

Even his wife Raisa died in 1997 without knowing anything about it. She passed away from cancer, and was cared for in her final years by her husband.

By that time he had largely faded into obscurity. At one point, things got so bad for Petrov that he had to grow potatoes in order to feed himself.

Colonel Petrov holding the Dresden Prize in 2013, which was presented to him by a 25-year-old – a person from the generation ‘that would not have survived’ had it not been for him (Picture: Oliver Killig)

It was only in 1998 that Petrov’s superintendent, Colonel General Yury Votintsev, told reporters about Petrov’s quiet act of heroism. A report then came out in the German tabloid Bild describing how this otherwise unknown former officer had saved the world.

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After that, he was presented with major awards, and was widely recognised as the man to whom the world was indebted.

In 2006 he was given an award by the Association of World Citizens, which read ‘To the man who averted nuclear war’, in the UN’s New York headquarters. In 2012 he was given the German Media Prize, which was also awarded to Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan.

The following year, in 2013, he was awarded the Dresden Peace Prize. It was handed to him by a 25-year-old resident of Dresden, who ‘belongs to the generation that would not have survived had it not been for Stanislav Petrov’.


In 2014 ‘The man who saved the world’, a film based on Petrov’s act of heroism, was released. It is due to be released in Russia in February next year.

But Petrov remained modest, never courting publicity or praise for his deeds.

‘At first when people started telling me that these TV reports had started calling me a hero, I was surprised,’ he said in an interview with RT in 2010.

‘I never thought of myself as one – after all, I was literally just doing my job.’