Who saved the world from nuclear war in 1983?

Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.

He was on duty at a Soviet nuclear early warning centre on September 26, 1983, when the system detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. According to the computer readouts, several missiles were launched. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own while the US missiles were still in the air. It was up to Petrov to confirm the incoming attack to the Soviet leaders. He took the decision that it was a false alarm. He reported a system malfunction. “I thought that the chances were 50-50 that the warning was real. Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. It was such a relief”, he recalled.

A later investigation concluded that the Soviet satellites had mistakenly identified sunlight reflecting on clouds as the engines of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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.

Stanislav Petrov died at 77 on May 19, 2017, in Fryazino, a Moscow suburb, where he lived alone on his pension.