Stanislav Petrov

Stanislav Petrov Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov** (7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017) was a Soviet military officer and lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces. He is widely known for his role during the **1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm**, when the Soviet early-warning system incorrectly reported that the United States had launched nuclear missiles. 1983 nuclear false alarm On **26 September 1983**, Petrov was the duty officer at the Soviet command centre responsible for monitoring the country's early-warning satellite system. The system reported that a small number of American intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched toward the Soviet Union. Petrov believed that the warning was likely a false alarm. He considered the limited number of missiles reported and the lack of confirmation from Soviet ground-based radar. Instead of immediately reporting the warning as a genuine nuclear attack, he classified it as a false alarm. By Juliette VA