"A Name to Remember......." Topic

…..courtesy of Mike on Daisy.

"Every human being alive today needs to remember and honor Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, for his intelligence and restraint, because in November of 1983 the world was seconds away from total global thermonuclear annihilation, and it was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov who used his judgement and refused to push the button that would have launched the entire USSR response to a perceived American first strike. It was on day 8 of the NATO Wargame exercise named Able Archer. The Soviets were absolutely convinced that the exercise from reports of a double agent in the UK government and key markers developed by the KGB that the west was about to launch a nuclear first strike,

The Soviet satellite missile launch warning system was glitchy and when it detected the launch of 3 US missiles, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov reasoned that the US would launch 3000 missiles and not 3 and refused to push the button. The next day, he was fired and kicked out of the Soviet Air Army. ,

In the aftermath of the incident, the Soviet government investigated the incident and determined that Petrov had insufficiently documented his actions during the crisis. He explained it as "Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don't have a third hand"; nevertheless, Petrov received a reprimand.

In 1984, Petrov left the military and got a job at the research institute that had developed the Soviet Union's early warning system. He later retired so he could care for his wife after she was diagnosed with cancer. A BBC report in 1998 stated Petrov had suffered a mental breakdown and quoted Petrov as saying, "I was made a scapegoat.""

BB

A strange mindset, to reprimand someone for not plunging us into a nuclear holocaust. It would be a typically human response though to destroy us all over a computer error. Thank the Gods that we didn't have an automaton sitting at the controls, but rather someone who had intelligence and could reason. Sadly such people seem to becoming fewer and fewer these days.
There is a film appropriately named "The Man Who Saved the World".