The date was September 26, 1983. A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces was sitting at his command station in Serpukhov-15 while sirens sounded, indicating that nuclear missiles had been launched from the United States. As you probably guessed from reading this in 2021, no rockets were fired from both sides in the Cold War that day. The credit for this lies with Stanislav Petrov, who made the decision to say that the reports were a false alarm, preventing a complete nuclear war between the two world powers. Today, we will look at what caused the false alarm and why Petrov managed to correctly assume that what he saw was an illusion.
Infrared missile detection
Petrov was tasked with monitoring the Oko early warning network, which consisted of a series of satellites in highly elliptical Molniya orbits. This orbit was cleverly chosen by Soviet scientists to allow Oko satellites to have a grazing view of the continental United States, which posed the greatest threat of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack at the time. Looking over the edge of the Earth with their infrared sensors, rather than looking down, the infrared energy from the evacuation of hot rockets could be easily spotted on the cold background of space, rather than on the Earth’s surface. The aim was to reduce false positives in phenomena such as wildfires and oil rig burnings, while providing good coverage without the need for a large number of satellites.
However, on that fateful September night, the Soviet satellite’s unique orbit would cause a major problem. The Oko system set off an alarm shortly after midnight, indicating that a single rocket had been launched from the United States. As the sirens swirled around him, Petrov almost froze. The political climate at the time was full, with total nuclear war a constant threat.
The siren screamed, but I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the big red backlit screen with the word “launch” on it.
The initial alarm was followed by other alerts, showing five missiles in total. Despite indications that all hell was about to break out, Petrov did not immediately pass the alert in the chain of command.
Is this broken?
With only a few minutes to react to a strike, time was of the essence, but things didn’t add up. The start of a nuclear war with only five missiles did not hit Petrov as a credible strategy, and satellite radar operators could not report the detection of any launches. Oko satellites have also been new and relatively untested so far. Thus, rather than reporting that there is a nuclear strike in the USSR, Petrov chose to go with his foreboding and report that the system is malfunctioning.
Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened. If there was a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.
Petrov’s sentiment turned out to be money, and the war dogs were kept on a leash that evening. It was indeed a false alarm, rather than American missiles, that triggered the warning. The date of the incident was exactly around the autumn equinox. Due to the position of the sun and high altitude clouds, sunlight was reflected on the satellite’s infrared sensors, triggering the satellite to report more rocket launches. The incident led to the creation by the Soviet Union of a complementary geostationary satellite system to confirm any indication of the launch of missiles from the US.
Stanislav Petrov was never rewarded or reprimanded for his decision. Eventually, he was demoted by a technicality because he did not complete his diary while tangling with the agonizing decision of whether the Earth should burn in nuclear fire on that cold September night. He lived the rest of his life in Russia, dying at the age of 77 in 2017.
The disaster was thus averted by Petrov’s actions; In the military environment of the time, it is likely that USSR officials warned that the American missiles received would have given the order to launch, causing unspeakable devastation. Instead, we were left with a great story and an even more intense lesson. Redundancy is always essential in systems that deal with life or death issues and it is even more polite to make sure that when these lives (or deaths) can be measured in the millions or billions. That is that sometimes you have to be careful, especially when a nuclear war is involved.