On The Brink

On The Brink

Matthew 24:22And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

More than 20 years ago, Stanislav Petrov saved the world from a thermonuclear war. Russia still prefers to overlook his heroic feat

It was his duty to push the button. After all, he - Stanislav Petrov - was the one who had written the instructions prescribing that particular course of action.

MOSCOW – It promised to be a quiet evening at the Soviet nuclear early warning center when Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov settled into the commander's seat on Sept. 26, 1983.

But within minutes, Colonel Petrov was locked in perhaps the most dangerous drama of the cold war. An alarm sounded, warning screens blinked. A computer map on the wall showed the hostile launch of a US nuclear warhead.

"Every second counted.... My legs were unsteady, my hands were trembling, my cozy armchair became a hot frying pan," says the former officer. It only got worse. Within five minutes the computer registered five more launches; the alarm flashed: "Missile Attack."

The decision that Petrov made in those pressure-cooked minutes - that the computer was in error, and the elaborate early warning system that he helped build was wrong - may have prevented a nuclear holocaust. He did not push the button even though he had reason to do it.

Twenty years later, there is growing concern that a similar nuclear miscue could happen again. The lone superpower and its former rival still aim thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert at each other's major cities. As the US rushes to deploy a missile shield this summer designed to intercept North Korean warheads, Clinton-era plans that would improve both US and deteriorating Russian detection systems are stalled.

At presidential summits in both 1998 and 2000, the US and Russia announced plans for a joint, real-time warning system in Moscow. The blueprint, drawing on American's sophisticated satellite network and Russia's wide radar net, promised to keep better tabs on the superpower arsenals as well as on terrorist threats.

"I wish I could say there is no chance of it [today]," Petrov says, in a matchbox kitchen with a yellowing star chart. "But when we deal with space - when we [play] God - who knows what will be the next surprise?"

Dreams of joint efforts ground to a halt long ago. Meanwhile, neglect has left Russia's system in disrepair.

"The fact is, the Russians are flying blind," says Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "There are huge portions of their periphery that are unmonitored because their satellites are down, and they've lost a number of [Soviet-era] radar sites."

The result is a growing concern about false readings that could show a hostile nuclear launch, and provoke real retaliation. Such fears have been augmented by a string of Russian military accidents, from failed test missile launches to a sunken nuclear submarine.

More about the 1983 event:
http://www.brightstarsound.com/