Petrov, Stanislav Evgrafovich

On the night of September 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was the operational duty officer of the command post at Serpukhov-15 , located 100 km from Moscow . At that time, the Cold War was at its peak: just three and a half weeks before, the South Korean passenger Boeing 747, which had twice violated the border, was shot down by the Soviet Union. The command post received information from the adopted early in the year space-based early warning system " Eye ". In the event of a missile attack, the country's leadership was immediately informed, which made the decision to retaliate. On September 26, while Petrov was on duty, the computer announced the launch of missiles from an American base.

With a single launch, the system qualifies it as a “start”, with repeated launches as a “nuclear missile attack” ^[5] . After that, the presence of the target must be confirmed by over-the-horizon and over-the-horizon detection means, after which information from the command post is automatically transmitted to the notified objects, red displays are lit in the " nuclear suitcase " of the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee, on the crocuses of the Minister of Defense, chief of the General Staff, and labor commanders troops. After that, the operators launch gyroscopes of Soviet ballistic missiles, awaiting the decision of the country's top military-political leadership to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. After it, the commander-in-chief of the missile forces through an automatic communication system with the troops must transmit an encoded version of the retaliatory strike and a code to unlock the missile launch mechanisms, and the commanders of combat complexes will only have two keys to open safes with punch cards of programs at the same time, enter them into the ballistic weapon computer and press start button. The flight time of a ballistic missile to the USSR when launched from Cape Canaveral, where the main ICBM base was located, is 40 minutes.

However, after analyzing the situation (the “launches” were made from only one point and consisted of only a few ICBMs ) and the reports of “visual artists” - ordinary soldiers who monitor the situation in air and outer space on screens in dark rooms, but this time they didn’t record US missile launches, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov decided that this was a false positive system, and transmitted the appropriate notification along the chain of command. Colonel General Yuri Votsevolodovich Votintsev , Commander of the Anti-Ballistic and Anti-Space Defense Forces, arriving at the CP, reported the system’s false operation to Commander-in-Chief and Defense Minister D. F. Ustinov ^[5] .

A subsequent investigation found that the reason was the exposure of satellite sensors to sunlight reflected from high-altitude clouds.

As the secretary of the newspaper “ Top Secret ” Dmitry Likhanov told Dmitry Likhanov himself, S.E. Petrov, on July 13, 1983, the scheduled maintenance work was carried out at the Central Control Commission under the new combat program, but when it was tried not in imitation but in operating mode, due to a malfunction in One of the blocks of the exchange system, the machine gave false information about the mass launch of ballistic missiles. “The chief of staff of the army, General Zavaliy, gave an oral order to decommission all developments. The developers, and they are civilians, categorically refused to comply with the general’s order and left the site. Then the military removed these developments with their own hands. I think this incident was directly related to what happened in September. As a result of the investigation, we brought to light a whole bunch of flaws in the space warning system about the launch of ballistic missiles. The main problems were the combat program and the imperfection of spacecraft. And this is the basis of the whole system. All these shortcomings were eliminated only by 1985, when the system was finally put on combat duty. "

According to Soviet military intelligence, American early warning systems also issued false alarms, bringing the world closer to a direct military conflict. In one case, the US Navy's alarm bomber even reached the North Pole to deliver a massive blow to the territory of the USSR. In another, the Americans announced the alarm, mistaking the migration of bird flocks as Soviet missiles. But, fortunately, these alarms were recognized on time and things didn’t come to ballistic missile launches ^[5] .

Because of military secrecy and political considerations, Petrov’s actions became known to the general public only in 1991 , when the journal “ Top Secret ” published the essay by journalist Dmitry Likhanov on the exploit of S. E. Petrov, based on an interview with Colonel General Yu. V Votintseva (during the events described - Commander of the Anti-Ballistic and Anti-Space Defense Forces of the Air Defense Ministry of the USSR ^[6] ), held in late 1990. Subsequently, Yu. V. Votintsev reflected events in his own memoirs ^[7] .

After retiring (in 1984), S. E. Petrov lived and worked in Fryazino near Moscow ^[8] .

Stanislav Petrov died on May 19, 2017 at the age of 77 . Journalist Dmitry Likhanov announced this in his Facebook account on May 23 ^[9] . A new essay on Petrov was published in the Rodina magazine in August ^[5] , on September 14, the regional German newspaper WAZ ^[10] published information with reference to the magazine, reporting that Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who had died in 1983, died in his apartment in the Moscow Region. year could give the order to deliver an atomic strike on the territory of the United States. On September 16, the Latvian Russian-language Internet publication Meduza wrote about this ^[2] , on the 18th there were publications in The New York Times and the BBC ^[11] .

• On January 19, 2006, in New York at the UN Headquarters, Stanislav Petrov was awarded a special award by the Association of World Citizens International Public Organization. It is a crystal figurine "Hand holding the globe" with the inscription "To the man who prevented a nuclear war " engraved on it.
• February 24, 2012 in Baden-Baden, Stanislav Petrov awarded the prize in the field of German media for 2011.
• On February 17, 2013, he won the , awarded for the prevention of armed conflict ( 25,000 euros ).

• In 2014, a documentary-feature film of the Danish director “The Man Who Saved the World ” ^[12] , dedicated to Stanislav Petrov, was released.
• A free version of the biography of Stanislav Petrov is set out in the first episode of the American science fiction series Pioneer One .

• Arkhipov, Vasily Alexandrovich
• Lionel Mandrake ( English Lionel Mandrake ) - the character of the movie Stanley Kubrick " Doctor Strangelove, or How I Stopped Afraid and Loved the Bomb " 1963, the captain of the British Air Force, unsuccessfully trying to save the world from nuclear war ^[13] .

• Alexander Rogoza. Lieutenant Colonel of the Missile Forces Stanislav Petrov: I saved the world? It was a working episode // Komsomolskaya Pravda : newspaper. - 2013. - No. 39 (26138) . - S. 10 . - ISSN 0233-433X .

• Yuri Vasiliev. The one that did not click (unopened) . Moscow News (April 27, 2004). Date of treatment March 19, 2011.
• Russian awarded for the prevention of nuclear war.
• Rewarding Stanislav Petrov with a special prize.
• The article " Ballistic Ghosts " in the journal "Popular Mechanics".
• Science solves fundamental problems ... March 11, 2014. Trv No. 149, p. 11, “Science and Society” by Mikhail Rodkin.
• Daria Zagvozdina. “The children were told that his father had a difficult job” // Gazeta.Ru . - 2013 .-- February 26.
• Anna Velegzhanina. The officer who saved the world // Komsomolskaya Pravda, December 21, 2016
• “Stanislav Petrov was declared to have died on September 18th” - obituary in the British journal The Economist , 09/30/2017 (eng.)
• Dmitry Likhanov . “40 minutes to the third world” // Homeland . - 2017. - September ( No. 9 ). - ISSN 0235-7089 .