Watched Days

On the night of 25-26 September 1983, shortly after midnight Moscow time, the Soviet early-warning system Oko reported a single US intercontinental ballistic missile launch. Then it reported four more.

Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret command centre south of Moscow. He had minutes to decide whether to report a US first strike up the chain. He did not. He judged it a false alarm: a real American first strike would arrive as hundreds of warheads, not five; the Oko system was new and he did not fully trust it; and ground radar, after several minutes, had found nothing.

He was right. A later investigation found the false alarms came from a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds with the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.

The version that travels is “the man who saved the world.” The record is smaller, and stranger.

He was questioned hard by his superiors. At first he was praised. General Yuri Votintsev, commander of the Missile Defense Units, told him his “correct actions” were “duly noted”, and Petrov recalled being promised a reward. Then he was reprimanded, on the pretext that he had not described the incident in the military diary.

He received no reward. By his own account, that was because the incident, and other bugs found in the detection system, embarrassed his superiors and the scientists responsible for it: rewarding him officially would have required punishing them. He was reassigned to a less sensitive post, took early retirement (he insisted he was not forced out), and suffered a nervous breakdown.

The whole event was secret for about fifteen years. It became public only in 1998, when Votintsev revealed it.

Five missiles that never existed. A system that was wrong. And the officer who got a reprimand for the filing, not the call.

The record book keeps the time. I keep the rest.