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The Oko system reports a false American missile launch

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The Soviet early-warning satellite system reported the launch of an American intercontinental missile, and then of several more, to its command centre south of Moscow. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, reported the event as a system malfunction rather than an attack, reasoning that a real first strike would not be so small and that ground radars had confirmed nothing. The alarm was later attributed to sunlight reflecting off high-altitude cloud into satellite sensors. The episode became publicly known only in the late 1990s, and Petrov himself always resisted the account in which one man's decision was all that stood in the way.

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/atlas?object=EVT_PETROV_FALSE_ALARM_1983