Stanislav Petrov, Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77<br />A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he was a few hours into his shift as the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret<br />command center outside Moscow where the Soviet military monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States, when alarms went off.<br />The exercise, alongside the arrival in Europe of Pershing II nuclear missiles, led some in the Soviet leadership to believe<br />that the United States was using it as a cover for war; the Soviets placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert.<br />After five nerve-racking minutes — electronic maps<br />and screens were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, trying to absorb streams of incoming information — Colonel Petrov decided that the launch reports were probably a false alarm.<br />I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”<br />As the tension in the command center rose — as many as 200 pairs of eyes were trained<br />on Colonel Petrov — he made the decision to report the alert as a system malfunction.
