2026-09-26 00:59 UTC
Happy Stanislav Petrov Day!
Many people have received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing a lot less than him. On this day 43 years ago, Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet military, the commanding officer of a USSR nuclear early warning site.
On Sept. 26th 1983, he watched in disbelief as the monitoring software showed that the US had launched 5 nuclear missiles. Why would America send 5 missiles when they had thousands? It didn’t add up.
Petrov stayed calm. His job was to suggest retaliation, but he chose not to, and did nothing. He was proved 100% right – it had been a false alarm.
Stanislav's choice to do nothing saved the world from destruction.
#ColdWar #NuclearAttack #FalseAlarm
Replies (1)
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@forthy42@mastodon.net2o.de 2026-09-26 16:27
@dbattistella@mstdn.ca He did nothing, but you are still right that others did less, and got the peace Nobel price. E.g. Kissinger got it in the middle of the war, while still bombing the hell out of Vietnam, and turning Cambodia into a hellhole by secretly bombing and thereby destabilizing it, leading to Pol Pots terror regime. How much against peace can you do and still get the price? Deep into the negative numbers.