Stanislav Petrov

Assembled from 14 blocks · 1 evidence · 4 related

1. Story
2. Lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who was the duty officer at the Oko early-warning command centre south of Moscow on the night of 26 September 1983 when the system reported the launch of an American intercontinental missile, and then of several more. His duty was to pass the report up the chain; he judged it a malfunction and reported it as such, on reasoning he gave afterwards: a genuine American first strike would not consist of a handful of missiles, and the ground-based radars that should have confirmed the tracks had seen nothing. He was right, and the cause was later attributed to an unanticipated sunlight reflection. Two cautions belong in the record. Petrov himself consistently played down the idea that he had personally prevented a nuclear war, pointing out that his report was one input among several and that confirmation from other systems would have been required. And the episode only became publicly known in the late 1990s, through the published recollections of a senior officer, so it is documented largely through testimony. He died in 2017.
3. Knowledge
4. The Oko early-warning satellite system
5. Stanislav Petrov
6. Connections
7. The Oko early-warning satellite system
8. The Oko system reports a false American missile launch
9. Serpukhov-15
10. Stanislav Petrov
11. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down
12. The Oko system reports a false American missile launch
13. Evidence
14. Named as the general narrative authority behind this pack's framing of the period, and cited in the Journey's own declared references. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. It is also a work with a definite interpretive position — broadly, that Soviet conduct drove the confrontation and that Western pressure and Soviet internal failure ended it — and this pack cites it as one reading rather than as a neutral summary.