Stanislav Petrov, 64, seems much like any other Russian pensioner. He lives in a decrepit town just outside Moscow; he spends too much of his monthly US$180 pension on cigarettes and vodka; he walks in the park with his dog. But there is one thing that is different about Stanislav Petrov: he saved the world.
As a lieutenant-colonel in 1983, this neglected hero worked at a Soviet early warning centre outside Moscow that controlled satellites monitoring rocket silos in the US. On September 26 that year, Colonel Petrov was in the commander's chair when the centre received a signal that the US had launched a multiple nuclear missile strike on the Soviet Union.
More than 30 computer checks confirmed the attack. With less than 10 nerve-shredding minutes to assess the threat, Colonel Petrov trusted his intuition and decided the signal was false.
'I was drenched in sweat,' he says. 'People were shouting, the siren was blaring. But a feeling inside told me something was wrong.'
It was. Weeks later, a malfunction was discovered in one of the satellites. Colonel Petrov had averted a nuclear holocaust.
More than 20 years on, this potential celebrity is all but forgotten, ignored by the Russian public. A commission of senior officers interrogated him in the wake of the scare and he was disciplined on a technicality: failing to make contemporaneous notes of the incident in a logbook. Not long after, he left the military.
