Shortly after midnight on the 27th of September 1983, a forty-four-year-old Soviet military officer named Stanislav Petrov was sitting in a reclining chair in a bunker eighty miles south of Moscow when his early warning system told him that the United States had launched a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union.
He had minutes to decide whether to believe it.
This is the first of a two-part episode on Stanislav Petrov and the most dangerous moment of the Cold War that almost nobody has heard of. In this episode we set the scene: who Stanislav Petrov was, what he was doing in that bunker, and why the autumn of 1983 was the most terrifying season of the entire Cold War.
Along the way we cover:
The OKO satellite network — the Soviet early warning system that Petrov had helped build, and that he was now being asked to trust with the fate of civilisation.
The near-misses that preceded 1983 — Vasili Arkhipov and the Soviet submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the man who refused to authorise a nuclear torpedo launch when his captain was convinced the war had already started. And Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1979 got out of bed at 3am and decided not to wake his wife before calling the president to recommend a retaliatory nuclear strike — only to be told, thirty seconds later, that someone had accidentally loaded a training tape into a NORAD computer.
The state of the world in 1983, Reagan's Evil Empire speech, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the deployment of Pershing II missiles to West Germany, and why the Soviet Union read all of these not as defensive posturing but as the systematic assembly of a first-strike capability.
Yuri Andropov: the former KGB chief who succeeded Nikita Brezhnev as General Secretary in November 1982. A dying man, conducting the business of running a nuclear superpower from a hospital clinic, connected to a dialysis machine, watching Ronald Reagan describe his country as the focus of evil in the modern world.
Korean Air Lines Flight 007: shot down by a Soviet interceptor on the 1st of September 1983, killing 269 people including a US Congressman. The event that poisoned an already toxic relationship just weeks before Petrov's night in the bunker.
And Reagan himself: who despite his bellicose rhetoric was privately horrified by Pentagon officials who believed nuclear war was winnable. "I can't believe that this world can go on beyond our generation," he said in a radio address from Camp David, "without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us."
The episode ends where it began — in Serpukhov-15, with Stanislav Petrov staring at a screen that now reads not launch, but missile attack.
What he does next is the subject of Part 2.
Content note: this episode contains discussion of nuclear weapons, mass casualty scenarios, and Cold War geopolitical history. No graphic content.
Primary and secondary sources for this episode:
The principal secondary sources for this episode and its companion are:
Taylor Downing, 1983: Reagan, Andropov and a World on the Brink (2018) — the most comprehensive single-volume account of the 1983 war scare.
Nate Jones (ed.), Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise that Almost Triggered Nuclear War (2016) — a collection of declassified primary documents, including CIA assessments, NSA intercepts, and internal NATO communications, assembled by the National Security Archive.
Additional material drawn from:
Petrov's own interviews, particularly his 2013 BBC interview on the thirtieth anniversary of the incident, and the 2014 documentary The Man Who Saved the World.
The Reagan Presidential Library's archive of public papers and radio addresses.
David Hoffman, The Dead Hand (2009) — Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Soviet nuclear programme and the 1983 war scare.
