September 26th, 1983 was probably a pretty normal day for our audience who lived in the 80's. However, that was the day humanity came closest to extinction. It was the height of the Cold War, and only 26 days early the USSR shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 passengers, including Representative Larry McDonald (D-GA) and several other Americans. On September 26th, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. and was the officer on duty when the Soviet nuclear detection system detected a nuclear warhead, previously fired, somewhere over Siberia. The Soviet Union's doctrine of mutually assured destruction should have resulted in the end of the world as we know it, but Petrov believed that where the U.S. to launch a nuclear strike at the U.S.S.R, it would be bigger than the five missiles detected. In reality, it was a rare alignment of sunlight on the clouds in the atmosphere. The aftermath of the 1983 False Alarm was very little. Stanislav Petrov died in 2017. However, Imagine if Stanislav Petrov was sick on the 26th, and another officer declared it an American attack? Imagine if the entire world was dotted in mushroom clouds and nuclear fallout.

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