Today we honor the actions of Stanislav Petrov (1939 – 2017) once again.

Half an hour past midnight on September 26, 1983, he saw the first apparent launch on his computer monitor in a glass-walled room on the top floor of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) command and control post. The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union.

"The main computer wouldn't ask me [what to do] - it was made so that it wouldn't even ask. It was specially constructed in such a way that no one could affect the system's operations." All that was up to Petrov was analyzing the available information and either saying the alarm was false or giving the computer the go-ahead, as per the directive he himself wrote.

"I just couldn't believe that just like that, all of a sudden, someone [...]

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