In September 1983, Stanislav Petrov was serving as a duty officer whose job was to pass along any signs of an incoming air strike that may me detected at Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker outside Moscow where Soviet forces monitored an early-warning system for nuclear strikes. For 25 minutes while he was on duty, his sensors indicated a U.S. nuclear strike was headed toward Moscow. Petrov stayed completely collected and filed this occurrence as a false alarm and those fateful minutes were his ability to press the big red button which could have catapulted the United States of America and the USSR into annihilation and the rest of the world from likely decades of radioactive fallout. Stanislav Petrov passed away on May 19, 2017.
I think that this is just such an amazing story and has not been told enough, especially now that Petrov has passed. What a drastic turn in history could have occurred had he told his superiors immediately of the sensors' conclusions and they had decided to launch a retaliatory strike. How unbelievable would this war be for our grandchildren to read about in their by then aged books? We toss around the thought of World War III happening a lot, but this seriously could have resulted in world-wide warfare had Petrov not taken an extremely stressful 15 minutes to put his and his country's faith in that the sensors were mistaken.
This relates to the many times that the US and the USSR clearly stood on opposite sides of the table, like the Cold War which lasted from 1947-1991.
Source:
https://apple.news/AyQaIjznDTh-2XEz697HT9A
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