Stanislav Petrov, the man who prevented a nuclear war.

[Knutsen]

I've looked for this story here at mp.net but haven't found anything so i thought it would be interesting to post it:


'I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut'

By David Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A19

Sidebar

MOSCOW – It was just past midnight as Stanislav Petrov settled into the commander's chair inside the secret bunker at Serpukhov-15, the installation where the Soviet Union monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States.

Then the alarms went off. On the panel in front him was a red pulsating button. One word flashed: "Start."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b.htm

The same story in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[djon]

good post

[kutter]

Good man. He certainly deserved to be treated better than than he was.

[Midav]

Have read about this before.

Good man! ****ty system!

Just shows human imperfection. Thank goodness this man was smart enough not to do anything.

[Freibier]

Great read, thanks for posting

[GazB]

Regarding ****ty system I remember a similar incident with the US system that detected a massive attack coming up over the horizon. FOr quite some time there were similar responses... shock, disbelief (it was a period of relative quiet politically speaking), and as no other sources confirmed the response the level of threat was reduced from whichever defcon they put the alert on. The error was eventually found to be a programming error. A problem with putting the decimal place in the wrong place. The attack turned out to be the rising moon.

Apart from the fact that politically things were cool the other main factor that led to suspicion was the fact that this threat was coming from a direction they hadn't expected a large attack to come from.

Still, not exactly good for the nerves.