Nuclear false alarm

On 26 September 1983, a false alarm at a Soviet command center nearly led to nuclear war. Stanislav Petrov (pictured), a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, was in charge at a secret bunker near Moscow when an alarm sounded, indicating that the US had launched a nuclear missile. The incident took place at a particularly tense time during the Cold War, as the USSR had shot down a South Korean passenger jet in Soviet airspace just three weeks before. If the US launched a nuclear attack, the Russians almost certainly would have retaliated with a devastating counterattack. Fortunately, Petrov showed poise and restraint. He had a hunch the warning was a false alarm, and he held to that view even when the computer system reported the launch of four more Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. Petrov later said the main reason for his conclusion was that the US would have launched a nuclear attack with a barrage of missiles, not five, to cripple the USSR. He also doubted the satellite-based early-warning technology; the more reliable ground-based radar, which would have picked up the incoming missiles minutes later, showed nothing out of the ordinary. (Photo credit: Z thomas, Hic et nunc, CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Date in History: 26 September 1983