In 1983, the Cold War escalated to new heights after the Soviet Union mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, Korean Air Flight 007, killing all 269 people on board. Just weeks later, Russian Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty when the nuclear missile detection system reported an incoming U.S. strike. With Cold War tensions already at a breaking point, Petrov had to decide whether to follow protocol – or launch a retaliatory attack and unleash nuclear war.Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterFollow Redacted: Declassified Mysteries with Luke Lamana on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting https://wondery.com/links/redacted/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to redacted, declassified mysteries early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In the early hours of September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Captain Chung Bae Young guided his Boeing 747 through the vast darkness over the North Pacific Ocean. Bae Young had been flying this exact route for five years.
This flight, number 007, was a 4,000-mile, eight-hour route from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul, South Korea. Captain Bae Young, a former Korean Air Force pilot, brought years of experience to the job. Along with the plane's advanced navigation system and his first-rate crew, he could fly to Seoul in his sleep.
Technically, he could sleep, since the autopilot did much of the flying, as it was right now. The plane held 246 passengers and 23 crew members. Most of the passengers were Koreans heading home. There were also a few dozen US citizens and a handful of people from Japan, Taiwan, and other countries.
The flight was so routine that the captain and his first officer were casually chatting with the crew of another plane a few minutes behind them. The conversation drifted to upcoming plans, like taking time off to enjoy the changing autumn leaves. At about 3.25 a.m. local time, the plane began approaching Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific Ocean.
In the warm cocoon of the cockpit, Byung and his crew were unaware that they were being closely watched. Their false sense of comfort was about to come to a horrifying end. They had no idea that the plane had gone completely off course and was actually illegally entering Soviet airspace in a sensitive region of the Russian Far East. Suddenly, the plane shook violently. Oxygen masks dropped.
Chaos erupted in the cabin as pressurized air inside began rushing out. as if someone had ripped open a door. Captain Bayoung felt the temperature drop as alarms blared in the cockpit. The flight engineer checked his instruments and confirmed that all four engines were functioning normally. Whatever had exploded, it wasn't an engine. Captain Bayoung's mind raced. The plane was out of control.
The first officer radioed Tokyo Air Traffic Control, informing them that they were experiencing a rapid decompression. Captain Bae Young tried to maneuver the plane to a lower altitude where there would be less damage from decompression, but he couldn't gain control of the aircraft that he had piloted so many times before.
He heard the terrified screams of passengers, and there was nothing he could do. For the next six minutes, the plane fell through the darkness, spiraling down 35,000 feet and then crashing into the Sea of Japan. No one survived. What happened to flight 007 would soon trigger a chain of events, pushing the world to the brink of World War III.
From Ballant Studios in Wondery, I'm Luke LaManna, and this is Redacted Declassified Mysteries, where each week we shine a light on the shadowy corners of espionage, covert operations, and misinformation to reveal the dark secrets our governments try to hide. This episode is called The Man Who Stopped World War III.
In the early 1980s, the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union had reached a fever pitch. Tensions between the two superpowers fueled an escalating arms race, aiming a total of 18,400 nuclear warheads at each other. America's president, Ronald Reagan, was a hardline anti-communist, openly referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. The Soviets were led by Yuri Andropov,
a dedicated communist who harbored a deep distrust of the United States. And in this powder keg of a situation, the world was about to face a moment that could have turned the Cold War hot and possibly wiped out humanity with the push of a button. But one man would end up saving the planet from nuclear disaster.
He would do something unthinkable in military circles, ignore a direct order to launch weapons. He was a Russian officer named Stanislav Petrov. As a Marine, I can tell you that following orders is drilled into us from day one. It's more than protocol. It's a fundamental principle of military service.
So I can't even begin to imagine what it would have been like to have the responsibility of being ordered to launch nuclear missiles and then choosing not to follow that order. The weight of that decision, it's almost unfathomable.
But Petrov's act of defiance and the fact that the world came so close to nuclear annihilation remained top secret until the mid-1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union finally allowed the story to emerge. In early 1982, Stanislav Petrov walked down the long corridor of a top-secret Soviet military bunker. Petrov was a 43-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Force.
The base, called Serpukhov 15, was located 80 miles south of Moscow. It was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by hundreds of armed soldiers. Soldiers at Serpikov-15 used satellites to scan the globe for missile launches, particularly those from American soil. Petrov's crucial role was to oversee incoming satellite data.
Any potential missile sighting would trigger an urgent verification process. If an incoming missile was confirmed, the leaders at Serpukhov 15 would then decide whether to strike back. So far, Petrov was thankful that he had never had to make that decision. After punching in a security code, Petrov entered a dimly lit cavernous room.
A massive screen dominated the space, displaying grainy satellite images of Earth. Beneath it, rows of soldiers sat hunched over bulky computer monitors. Fluorescent light bounced off their faces. As Petrov walked into the control room, conversations quieted down, and all eyes turned to him. Petrov wasn't tall or imposing, but he commanded respect from his men.
He attributed this skill less to his military experience and more to his childhood days mediating disagreements on the soccer field. After graduating from an engineering technical college, Petrov joined the Soviet air defense system. He never had to fly planes, which was fine by him. He much preferred the emerging world of technology.
Petrov had a mind for understanding complex radar systems and could keep cool under pressure. Over time, others in his unit, including higher-ups, started coming to him for technical advice. Petrov gained a reputation as an expert in his field. Early in his time at Serpukhov 15, Petrov posed a thought-provoking question to one of his officers.
He wondered how they could tell the difference between missile warning drills and the real thing when the two looked almost the same on their screens. The officer had a terse reply, ''We do our duty.'' The answer left a lasting impact on Petrov. It drove home the critical nature of his role, emphasizing that he must perform his task precisely, regardless of the chaos that might surround him.
As Petrov sat at his station deep underground, he felt like he was right where he needed to be. A small screen sat above a panel of buttons and knobs before him. The specific satellite system he worked with was codenamed OKO, which meant Eye. a fitting name for the satellites that kept watch over the planet.
He turned on the display and got to work overseeing the system which controlled the fate of the Soviet Union and ultimately the world. Deep in the basement of the White House's West Wing, President Ronald Reagan walked into the Situation Room. He was there to watch a military simulation codenamed Ivy League 82. It was March 1st, 1982. Reagan was 71 and barely into his second year as president.
Just 11 months earlier, Reagan had stared death in the face after an assassination attempt. Despite being shot, he had made a remarkable recovery. Reagan now faced a world teetering on the edge of destruction. Neither the US or the Soviet Union were willing to back down from their escalating arms race, and both continued to build more and more nuclear weapons.
Reagan took his seat at the large mahogany conference table. Top advisors from the White House and Pentagon settled into leather chairs, their faces serious. The Situation Room didn't look like much. It had wooden walls and a few televisions. But there were few places in the world where such consequential decisions were made.
It was where the President and the National Security Council would gather to face any sort of national emergency or critical situation. On this day, there was no emergency, but Reagan and his team were preparing for one. The military exercise, called Ivy League 82, was designed to test command and control procedures during a nuclear conflict. The U.S.
needed to ensure that its forces could continue to communicate in the event of an unprecedented attack. Reagan's new National Security Advisor, William Clark, quieted everyone in the room. They were ready to begin. What Reagan saw on the large projection screen stunned him. It showed a map of the United States.
On it, red dots representing Soviet missile strikes started appearing, first on Washington DC, then on New York City, a three-hour train ride away. More red dots appeared over Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and then key military bases across the U.S. Next were Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco. Soon, the entire country was a sea of red. And it wasn't over.
The simulated exercise showed the Soviets launching a second barrage of nuclear missiles, and the red dots began to fill in any untouched spots on the map. If this were a real attack, nearly everyone in the United States would be dead. Even though he knew this was just a simulation, Reagan was extremely disturbed by what he saw.
The Soviets could potentially destroy the entire country and do it all in just about a half an hour. Later that night, President Reagan came back to the Situation Room for another exercise. This time, he was briefed on how to identify himself to the Pentagon using codes if he wanted to launch a nuclear attack. Again, he felt the gravity of the situation.
He was now simulating his own role in the nuclear war and his own power to kill tens of millions of human beings on the other side of the world. Despite the horror of nuclear war, Reagan believed that an arms reduction or easing tensions with the Soviets would simply not work. Any attempt to pull back would be seen as weakness by the enemy.
So the only way to beat the Soviets was to strengthen America's position. and bully the Soviets into submission. Reagan's defense secretary had vowed to rearm America, and that's exactly what they did. The administration was overseeing the biggest peacetime increase in military spending in history, and now, in the Situation Room, Reagan was witnessing what that all could mean.
Death on a scale never before seen in this world. In June 1982, Major Oleg Gordievsky showed his passport and ID badge to a guard at the Soviet embassy in London. He entered the compound in Hyde Park for the first time, went up three flights of stairs, and walked down several long hallways. He saw signs on every wall written in Russian.
They read, in no uncertain terms, don't say names or dates out loud. The Russian major finally reached an office, where he received a long orientation. He was an officer with the KGB, the Soviet Union security agency, and he was being assigned to work at the embassy in London. Gordievsky was reminded several times that computers and electronic typewriters were not allowed on embassy grounds.
because they could be easily bugged. He was also told to keep an eye out for listening devices everywhere he went. Of course, Gordievsky knew this already. He trained in Moscow and worked at the embassy in Copenhagen. He knew that his Soviet comrades in London were obsessed about spies. Still, he was surprised at the sheer level of paranoia here.
Everywhere you turned in the compound, you were reminded that the British Secret Service, MI6, could be, and likely was, spying on you. At the embassy, you were encouraged to distrust your own colleagues, your friends, and your family. They said even your pets could be bugged.
One of the many official byproducts of this mass Soviet suspicion was a relatively new intelligence program called Operation Ryan. It had been started by party chairman Yuri Andropov when he was still the head of the KGB.
Operation Ryan's goal was to detect any signs that the United States or its allies might be planning a nuclear strike on the USSR, and Gordievsky had come to London to work on it. But he was also working on another top secret project, one that he could be killed for if anybody found out. A few weeks after his arrival in the UK, Gordievsky waited until everyone in the office had left for lunch.
He then discreetly gathered some documents and took them to an apartment in West London. He parked far away and covered the diplomatic plates on his car. Then he walked to the apartment where he had a scheduled monthly meeting. The meetings were never to last longer than 50 minutes, so he could return to the embassy without raising suspicion.
There, in the West London flat, he met two British MI6 agents. Gordievsky was a double agent. He'd been recruited by British intelligence eight years earlier and had been providing them with intel ever since. The Soviet embassy was right to be paranoid. An MI6 administrator in the apartment took photos of the documents Gordievsky brought.
All the while, he updated the agents on what he'd learned that month. This time around, he'd provided MI6 with all the details he had on Operation Ryan. He explained that KGB agents like himself were looking for any signs that the UK was preparing for war.
Since it was America's most powerful ally, the KGB was monitoring any British troop movements, travel plans of politicians, and even construction of new roads. Gordievsky's job as a Soviet agent was to help arrange government contacts and befriend journalists who could unknowingly supply information to the KGB.
The hope was all these bits of information would paint a picture of what the British were doing. But Gordievsky had a hunch that his anxious Soviet bosses would take all the information he provided and twist it to confirm their fears. If you're nervous enough, even ordinary road construction could be interpreted as proof the West was about to attack.
He predicted that his bosses would see imminent threats everywhere.
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A few months later, on September 14, 1982, President Ronald Reagan sat across from a man named Edward Teller in the Oval Office in the White House. Teller was a nuclear physicist and chemical engineer. He was known as the father of the hydrogen bomb for his work developing one of the most destructive technologies ever created.
Teller briefed Reagan on a revolutionary concept, a third generation of nuclear weapons. His idea was to deploy powerful X-ray lasers in space that would destroy incoming enemy missiles before they reached the U.S. It sounded like science fiction, but Teller convinced Reagan it was possible.
After witnessing the Ivy League 82 exercise six months earlier, Reagan was more frightened than he'd ever been of nuclear war. but he also believed that the US had to be prepared for it both offensively and defensively.
It previously didn't seem possible to defend against a nuclear attack, but now the father of the H-bomb was describing a strategy that might just give the US the upper hand against the Soviets. Reagan asked his top advisors to further study this wild idea of space defense and see if it was feasible.
Six months later, in February 1983, Reagan listened as the head of the Navy confirmed that Teller's idea could theoretically work. Computers, lasers, and particle beams had advanced to the point that shooting nuclear missiles down from space was a legitimate prospect. Reagan was so excited about the news that he wanted to announce this bold new plan during an upcoming televised address.
His advisors, including the Secretary of State and the Defense Secretary, urged him to hold off, but he did it anyway. At 8 p.m. on March 23, 1983, Reagan spoke to the country and the world from the Oval Office on live TV.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
Reagan called this bold new program the Strategic Defense Initiative, but it was swiftly dubbed Star Wars by the media and critics alike. Kremlin officials were immediately alarmed at the idea. If U.S. space lasers were capable of neutralizing Soviet nuclear attacks, their arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads would be obsolete.
Then, what would stop the United States from launching a massive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union? It was a possibility the Soviets simply wouldn't accept. Late on August 31, 1983, six months after Reagan's announcement, Major Gennady Osipovich of the Soviet Air Force took command of the night shift.
He led a squadron of Su-15 interceptor jets out from a large naval base on Sakhalin, Russia's largest island in the Far East, just north of Japan. Osipovich took off and guided the fleet up to cruising altitude.
As an experienced squadron leader, Osipovich figured it would be another night of chasing shadows, or at most, of deterring foreign planes that approached, but never quite passed into, prohibited Soviet airspace without real conflict.
For months, Osipovich and his squadrons had been sent to deter any American aircraft that were spotted flying over the sea just east of Soviet territory, but they never crossed over, so the missions felt like a waste of time. Then Major Osipovich heard the radio crackle. Ground control told him to fire his guns to test his armaments.
The order was usually a sign that he might need to use those guns later, so Osipovich was a bit surprised. But he followed orders, pulling the trigger and letting off a few rounds. Everything worked just fine. As he wondered what prompted the order, ground control sent another message. An aircraft was heading towards Soviet airspace. He was informed that it was most likely a U.S. spy plane.
Osipovich suddenly felt his senses sharpen. He checked his radar and headed towards the aircraft. Just after 3 a.m., Osipovich pulled within 20 miles of the plane. He tried to contact it using standard military radio procedures, but he got no response. Then he transmitted messages on the International Emergency Frequency and the Military Distress Channel. Again, nothing.
His next order was to try and force the plane to land. Osipovich flashed his lights and tipped his wings to draw the attention of the plane's crew. He saw no sign of acknowledgement. As he updated ground control, he could hear a flurry of overlapping voices. He was ordered to fire his guns across the plane's trajectory.
In 13 years of flying, he'd never been ordered to fire warning shots like this. But once again, Osipovich did as he was told. He fired the shots, but in the dark sky, they went unnoticed by the mysterious plane. Osipovich didn't know it, but he was firing at Korean Air Flight 007.
At that moment, inside the dimly lit cabin of flight 007, most of the passengers were stealing their last moments of sleep before breakfast service started. The long-haul flight had been uneventful, with only the steady drone of engines as company. From the cockpit, the crew could only see the vast expanse of ink-black sky outside their windows.
Following their flight plan, they had received clearance from air traffic control to ascend another 2,000 feet. The crew adjusted the autopilot settings, and the Boeing 747 began its gradual climb, its speed temporarily decreasing as part of the maneuver. The change was so subtle that the sleeping passengers remained completely unaware of their ascent.
Major Osipovich's eyes narrowed as he continued to track the enemy plane on his radar. He watched the aircraft climb, and to his surprise, its speed dropped significantly. Caught off guard by this abrupt change, Osipovich found himself overtaking his target. His Su-15 interceptor jet, which was designed for high-speed pursuit, zoomed past the larger, slower-moving plane.
As he banked hard to circle back, Osipovich thought it was obvious that the intruder was making an evasive maneuver. He flew in close enough to see that the plane had four engines. It definitely looked like a commercial American plane, but it made no sense that a plane like that, with sophisticated navigation, could end up so far off course.
He couldn't make out the writing on the fin, but he could see a row of dark windows on the side. Osipovich believed this had to be a spy plane disguised as a passenger aircraft, which the Americans sometimes used for reconnaissance. Osipovich was sweating now. It seemed inevitable there would be a confrontation. After about 10 minutes, he was cruising behind the aircraft again, ready to fire.
But the enemy plane was heading out of Soviet airspace, and he was still awaiting orders on what to do next. It felt like every second was racing by, and his window of opportunity was rapidly collapsing. Osipovich knew that orders were moving up the ranks from the captains to the lieutenant colonels to the generals. Each moment ticked by. And then, finally, he got the message. Destroy the target.
Osipovich held his breath. Then he launched two missiles, one heat-seeking and one radar-controlled. Each of them contained 88 pounds of explosives. The heat-seeker hit the left wing of the target, and the radar-controlled missile hit the rear. The plane stayed aloft momentarily, then Osipovich reported to ground control that it had been destroyed. He turned and flew back to his base.
He had just taken down a commercial aircraft, Korean Air Flight 007. The following morning, on September 1st, 1983, Secretary of State George Shultz rushed to the White House soon after finding out about the attack. At 10.45, he addressed the nation on TV.
The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy. We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.
President Reagan was also outraged. The consensus at the White House was that the Korean Airlines shooting exposed the Soviets as a cruel and savage enemy, thirsty for capitalist blood. They knew the plane was filled with civilians, but shot it down anyway. Meanwhile, U.S. Air Force intelligence determined that a combination of factors led the plane off course.
The autopilot might have been set slightly off, and over time the navigation system gradually drifted without the crew realizing it. And coincidentally, earlier that day, a genuine American military reconnaissance aircraft had been detected in the vicinity.
The Air Force concluded that the Soviets were likely still on high alert from the earlier sighting, and may have mistaken the civilian airliner for a military threat. And the warning shots and flashing lights by the Soviet pilot could have been easily missed by the Korean air pilots, who had no idea they were off course.
Heartbreaking as the situation was, Schultz saw an opportunity to prove to the world that the Soviets were the villains of the Cold War. The U.S. immediately suspended all Soviet passenger air service to the United States. It also placed its military forces on heightened alert. There are no records of how Soviet leader Yuri Andropov reacted to the downing of Flight 007.
He had been in power for less than 10 months and was in the hospital when the incident happened. But other Soviet officials were quick to respond. They claimed it was orchestrated by the US as a deliberate provocation meant to undermine the Soviet Union's peace efforts. If tensions were high between the two superpowers before, they had now reached a boiling point.
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A few weeks after the attack, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was making dinner for his wife Raya. It was September 26, 1983. Raya was sick and battling cancer and had become extremely weak. Petrov brought the food on a tray to her in bed in their small, sparsely decorated apartment. Raya thanked him in a weak voice as Petrov sat beside her and helped her eat.
As he tipped a glass of water into her mouth, the phone rang. Petrov answered. It was someone from the Serpukhov 15 base calling. Another senior officer at the station was sick. They wanted Petrov to cover the night shift. He didn't want to leave Raya, but he had no choice. He agreed and put on his uniform, then kissed his wife goodbye.
He said he hoped she'd get some sleep and that he'd see her in the morning. Tensions at work had been high since the Korean Airlines incident, and Petrov felt the stress acutely. The pressure intensified as Soviet officials publicly claimed that the US deliberately sent Flight 007 into Soviet airspace, most likely to spy.
Meanwhile, news broadcasts in the Soviet Union showed NATO allies testing new ballistic missiles during military exercises. A Soviet official cautioned that these missiles could potentially be used for a surprise attack against the USSR. Petrov thought that relations between the two great powers were now at their very worst.
It was bad enough that his wife was sick, but now it seemed like the entire globe was on the brink of World War III. And this time, two sides had access to nuclear arms. Petrov pulled up to Serpukhov 15 about an hour later. The moon was bright and nearly full, and he could feel the season's first chill.
He walked inside the concrete building and, as he had done countless times before, took his position at the command center. At midnight Moscow time, Petrov glanced at the monitors displaying data from Soviet satellites, which kept a close eye on their adversaries from 20,000 miles above the Earth. Everything seemed normal.
But as he sipped a cup of tea and chatted with a colleague, an alarm suddenly blared. The persistent noise was jarring and didn't sound like the usual exercise signal. Petrov looked up at a monitor. Large red letters flashed over a white background with a clear and frightening message. Launch. His eyes shot from the screen to the other analysts.
They were all staring up at him, wondering what to do. For a moment, Petrov couldn't move. He was shocked. The message meant a satellite had picked up an incoming missile from a base on the west coast of the United States. Petrov forced himself into action. He ordered everyone to check their systems, and the men scrambled to confirm the American launch.
Petrov's heart raced as his team confirmed both the main computer and its backup were functioning correctly. Then, as abruptly as they had begun, the alarms fell silent and the message vanished. Petrov was confused but relieved. Then the banner on the main screen suddenly changed once again. Now it flashed the words, Missile Attack. Missile Attack. Petrov silently cursed.
He needed visual proof from the satellites that a missile had actually been launched. Normally, a ballistic missile is visible to the satellites for the first three minutes after it launches. But as he searched the satellite imagery, he saw nothing. No flashes, no fire, no contrails in the sky. The alarm had to be a mistake.
Petrov picked up the phone and reported back to the military command center that a missile launch had been detected but he believed that it was a false alarm. He and his team reset the launch detection system. It was silence as everyone waited for it to restart. Seconds later, the alarm blared again, this time indicating a second launch had been detected. Was Petrov's gut wrong?
He had his team reset the system again to be sure, but the alarm went off yet again. Now three incoming American missiles had been detected, But still Petrov had not confirmed visual observations of any of them. As Petrov stood in the bunker, terrified, a fourth missile and then a fifth were detected. The alarm seared into his brain. His men were all looking to him for their orders.
Petrov willed himself to concentrate. He knew American Minuteman missiles traveled at four miles per second. So if these launches were real, the first American warhead would reach Russia in about eight minutes, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. He knew that's how long he had to make a decision. Eight minutes.
He also knew that if he reacted by sending missiles of his own, it could mean annihilation for tens of millions of people around the world. Nuclear winter could follow, which would mean darkness and extreme cold, global crop failures and widespread famine. He glanced at the clock. By this point, he had just three minutes left to decide.
Would America really start a war by launching just a few of their thousands of nuclear warheads? Petrov had always been told a first strike would be massive. It didn't make sense. He felt paralyzed, but his training demanded action. The mantra drilled into every Soviet officer echoed in his mind. We do our duty. The room was silent. All eyes were on Petrov.
Just one minute remained until the first strike. He calculated the odds in his head. The computer showed missiles. The visuals did not. Finally, Petrov made his decision. There were too many confounding factors. He didn't want to be responsible for starting a third world war if the alarms were wrong. With just seconds left to strike, he shut his eyes and bowed his head to brace for the impact.
But it never came. Petrov opened his eyes. There was no strike. There were no missiles. He had made the right call. Petrov's story illustrates how an ordinary person can make an extraordinary decision. He demonstrated calm, rational thinking in a moment of profound crisis.
But his experience highlights the inherent dangers of systems that rely on human judgment, while also warning against overdependence on technology. Had Petrov blindly followed protocol or unquestioningly obeyed the computer's output, the fate of humanity might have been drastically altered. His decision to question both the rules and the technology potentially saved our entire civilization.
An investigation later discovered that one of the satellite's sensors had not detected missiles, but rather rays of light reflected off high-altitude clouds. This caused the computers at Serpukhov 15 to mistake the sun's rays for rocket flares. If someone less familiar with the many faults of the computer system had been in charge that night, who knows where the world would be now?
The incident at Serpukhov 15 epitomized the dangerous levels of mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union. Years of Cold War tension had created an atmosphere where even a computer glitch could be misinterpreted as an act of aggression, potentially triggering nuclear war. In communist Russia, the false alarm incident ruined Stanislav Petrov's 26-year career in the military.
Immediately after avoiding catastrophe, he was verbally admonished for not keeping detailed logs that night and held in an isolation bunker for three straight days. But the failure to log wasn't the real reason he was punished. It was his failure to follow protocols, no matter the consequences. The next year, in 1984, Petrov was discharged.
For 10 years, Petrov and the Soviets kept that fateful night a secret. Word didn't leak out until after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved. Russian journalists found Petrov in 1996. He was living a quiet life in an old Soviet tower block. Soon after that, the West caught wind of what had happened in the bunker and Petrov finally started getting the recognition he deserved.
The Secretary General of the United Nations would recognize him as the man who saved the world. Petrov was haunted by the false alarm for the rest of his life and by how close he came to making the wrong decision. How everything depended on one decision by one man.
He told one reporter, one way or another, you still need a person to order a launch of one of these weapons, and a person can always make a mistake. Petrov died on May 19, 2017. He was 77 years old. His Encyclopedia Britannica entry reads, he is survived by his two children, two grandchildren, and the entire human race.
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From Ballin Studios and Wondery, this is Redacted, Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke LaManna. A quick note about our stories. We do a lot of research, but some details and scenes are dramatized. We used many different sources for our show, but we especially recommend the books 1983, Reagan, Andropov, and A World on the Brink by Taylor Downing.
The Brink, President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 by Mark Ambinder, and Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World by Matthew C. Rivers. This episode was written by Sean Raviv. Sound design by Ryan Potesta. Our producers are Christopher B. Dunn and John Reed. Our associate producer and researcher is Teja Palakanda. Fact-checking by Sheila Patterson.
For Ballin Studios, our head of production is Zach Levitt. Script editing by Scott Allen. Our coordinating producer is Samantha Collins. Production support by Avery Siegel. Produced by me, Luke LaManna. Executive producers are Mr. Ballin and Nick Witters. For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villapando. Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda, Dave Schilling, and Rachel Engelman.
Senior managing producer is Nick Ryan. Managing producer is Olivia Fonte. Executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis. For Wondery...