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27 June 2004 |
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IT WAS just after midnight when the first alert jolted Stanislav Petrov upright in his chair inside the bunker at the Serpukhov-15 buildings, south of Moscow. The control panel at his station flashed "ctapt" in Russian script. It was the command he always feared would confront him one day on his shift in the secret early-warning centre from which Soviet nuclear responses were controlled. The English translation was "start" and it was a direction to begin the countdown for a missile strike against the US. The alert klaxon was piercing Lieutenant-Colonel Petrov's eardrums as he tried to gather his thoughts. His computers, linked to satellites watching over Soviet security, were telling him that US missiles had been launched and Moscow would be obliterated in 15 minutes. Uniformed operators were staring at him, the man who would pass the warning up the chain of command, initiating retaliatory action against the West. He had a telephone in one hand, an intercom in the other, and his was the voice that would issue the warning that would end the world as he knew it. This was no drill. The atmosphere in the room was thick with dread as the red light flashed its insistent "start, start, start" command and communication links with scores of missile silos burst into life. It was September 26, 1983, in Moscow but still the 25th in Washington. It was a date about to be infamous forever as the beginning of World War III, which would probably last only days but claim millions of lives on both sides as nuclear missiles rained down on Moscow and New York, St Petersburg and Chicago, Volgograd and Detroit. Asked what weapons would be used in World War III, Albert Einstein had said: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. Rocks." "Everyone was stupefied," Lt-Col Petrov, then 44, recalled. They had trained for this but could not bring themselves to believe the madness of nuclear war was about to break out. Thanks to one man, however, the button remained unpressed. Thanks to Lt-Col Petrov, a career soldier who rehearsed for war but longed for peace, Soviet missiles stayed on their launchers. He made a guess that his equipment had malfunctioned Ð and he was right. According to many peace groups around the world, Lt-Col Petrov is a hero - the once-anonymous Russian, now living on a modest pension, deserving star status for the lives he saved. Some in the Australian Parliament agree Ð Democrats Senator Lyn Allison moved to have him recognised 21 years after his close call with Armageddon. The Senate motion honouring him was passed this week. "Though he won't say it, I will. I think he was most definitely a hero," says Bruce Blair, a US authority on Cold War nuclear strategies. The false alarm that almost triggered a war was kept secret until the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, after which information about Lt-Col Petrov leaked out to the West. It was a close run thing. US-Soviet tensions had been high and it is very likely Soviet commanders would have ordered a nuclear response if Lt-Col Petrov had acted on the early warning system's false detection of incoming missiles. It was the time US President Ronald Reagan was calling the Soviet Union "the evil empire". The Soviets, struggling to keep pace with US military technology, were engaged in an arms race that was pushing them towards bankruptcy. They feared they were falling behind, becoming vulnerable. They still had strategies in place for invading Western Europe with a bold and massive stroke that would make Hitler's blitzkrieg seem child's play. NATO had strategies for stopping such an attack Ð with battlefield nuclear weapons if all else failed. Only a month before the false alert, in an incident that sent the temperatures of the Cold War warriors soaring, the Soviets had shot down a Korean passenger jet, killing 269 people, including Americans. Inside the Kremlin, President Yuri Andropov was rattled by angry US protests - the Soviet Union ordered its forces to ready themselves for some form of retaliation. Coincidentally, NATO was preparing for exercises that would test Europe's defences. The US Navy also was sending ships into the Barents Sea for an exercise on Russia's doorstep. It was not a time for mistakes. "If the Soviet Union had overreacted, it could have gone very badly," according to former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky. "If war had come, Soviet missiles would have destroyed Britain entirely, at least half of Germany and France and America would have lost maybe 30 per cent of its cities and infrastructure." Lt-Col Petrov had settled into his command chair at Serpukhov-15 a little after midnight. He was not supposed to be on duty, coming in only because a colleague was unavailable. The computers were buzzing gently when he settled down to work, registering normal status as they communicated with Oko satellites orbiting Earth, their sensors scouring the Atlantic Sea and US mainland for the blast of missiles launched from submarines or underground silos. There were nine satellites in the Soviet Union's early-warning constellation at the time, one following the other in relentless orbits, depending on infra-red waves to identify the hot exhaust of a rocket launch. Only seven were on line when Lt-Col Petrov started his shift. Making do with what he had, he was situated at a critical point in the chain of command, overseeing staff monitoring signals from the satellites. He would transmit word of an attack to general command, which in turn would contact President Andropov. Time was of the essence - swift retaliation against the US would almost certainly follow his assessment that the homeland was in danger. Now his nerves were facing the ultimate test. Asked later if he had time to consider the global implications, he said: "I always thought of it. I always refreshed it in my memory. At that moment, there was no time to think. There was only time for work, work, work." The data was telling him the US had launched a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Then another, and another. The system was, as he later put it, "roaring" at him with urgent information on five launches. One launch did not usually trigger warnings throughout the command system - but these multiple launches were already being reported to scores of Soviet defence units as he wrestled with the gravity of the incoming data. There were scattered high-altitude clouds over Malmstrom that day. Because it was close to the autumnal equinox, the relative positions of the sun and clouds created a mirror effect. Instead of diffusing the sunlight, the clouds reflected it into space, confusing the infra-red sensors aboard satellite Cosmos 1382. As sunlight bounced off the clouds, Cosmos 1382 dutifully reported first one, then five launches. For Lt-Col Petrov, the ultimate holocaust was at hand. Still, he hesitated. "I just couldn't believe that, just like that, all of a sudden, someone would hurl five missiles at us," he said. "Five missiles wouldn't wipe us out. The US had not five missiles but a thousand missiles in battle readiness." A great weight bore down on him. He said: "I imagined if I'd assume the responsibility for unleashing World War III . . . and said, no, I wouldn't." He did not know yet that nature had played tricks with one of his satellites, but Lt-Col Petrov had doubts about the early-warning system. It was new. It had been rushed into commission. "I had a funny feeling in my gut. I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision. And that was it." Soviet politicians made Lt-Col Petrov the scapegoat for the false alarm, the blame falling on him instead of the mistake-prone technology. He suffered stress-related illnesses and was quietly retired from the army. Now the man who saved the world is a pensioner. He is 65 and shares his one-bedroom flat outside Moscow with memories of what might have been if he had pressed the button. |
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27 June 2004 |
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http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/... |
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A RETIRED Russian army colonel has emerged as the hero of a desperate incident that saw the world come within seconds of assured nuclear destruction. On September 26, 1983, Russia's strategic early warning system alerted the Soviet military to massive incoming US nuclear strike. On duty in a bunker just outside Moscow was Russian Lt-Col Stanislav Petrov. Petrov came within seconds of ordering a massive retaliatory strike but recognised that the automatic system signalling the launch of US intercontinental ballistic missiles was faulty. This week Lt-Col Petrov was commended as "the man who saved the world" by a motion passed unanimously by the Australian Senate. And he was presented with the World Citizen Award by the Association of World Citizens on Friday.
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27 June 2004 |
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THE people of Earth have flirted with Armageddon in the nuclear age. While the United States was the only power with atomic bombs in World War II, crushing the belligerent Japan with them in 1945, the arms race that followed nudged us ever closer to the brink. There were fingers on buttons in the Korean War in 1950 as communism and capitalism stared each other down. The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 pitted the US against the Soviet Union in what seemed, at the time, a prelude to global hostilities, while it is terrifying to contemplate the consequences if Israel had employed its nuclear arsenal against an invading Arab army. The risks multiplied at frightening speed in the Cold War. The Soviet Union's vast array of missiles was at times at the command of a paranoid mass murderer in Joseph Stalin and a buffoon in Leonid Brezhnev, while there might also have been drunken itchy trigger fingers on the other side of the equation. The fitting acronym for a nuclear attack and its response in kind was MAD (for Mutually Assured Destruction). How close we came to the nightmare of a nuclear winter, or at least the destruction of major cities, is told in the article on Stanislav Petrov in the Extra section in today's Sunday Herald Sun. It was very close - millions of lives hung in the balance when Moscow's early warning centre detected hostile missiles. Yet courage competes with arrogance; the spirit of individualism with the closed mind of totalitarianism in the report of the 1983 near-disaster. An unorthodox hero, Lt-Col Petrov, alone stood between reason and the madness of a nuclear war. Despite the electronic evidence flooding in to his command post from spy satellites, he refused to believe the US was attacking. The Soviet missiles stayed in their silos. He bought time to expose the alarm as false. He averted a holocaust. It is chilling to recall that faulty technology almost caused World War III, but inspirational that a person, just like one of us, saved the planet. URL for Petrov/Operational Status of Nuke Weapons resolution (This URL sometimes works and sometimes gives a 'runtime error'): http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?...
Senator Allison amended general business notice of motion no. 895 by leave and, pursuant to notice of motion not objected to as a formal motion,
moved-That the Senate- |
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