Stanislav Petrov

He is the second person who I want to mention in my blog.

But... who is he? He is basically the reason why we are writing blogs, the reason why you are reading them, the reason why we do what we do and the reason why we are not dead or struggling for a miserable life. An example of flexibility, of intelligence and of knowing when to break a rule.

I will be brief because I will give you a link.

What where you doing during the evening of Sunday, September 25, 1983? Well, that evening, early Monday in the Soviet Union, in one of the computer rooms that controlled the thousands of nuclear weapon-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, the alarms went off. There was a warning that an American nuclear missile was heading towards the Soviet Union. Petrov's duty was to inform the Soviet leadership about an event like this for prompt retaliation. He said to himself "it must be an error, if the Americans were to attack , they would not fire one single missile". Seconds after that reasoning, the alarms went off again. Two, three, four, five missiles were supposed to be heading towards the USSR. There was no way he could prove it wrong since the satellites would only have confirmed it when it would have been too late. He trusted his intuition and declare the event a false alarm. Minutes passed and no nuclear attack was evident. It was a computer error. He basically saved the world from the nuclear holocaust. Another person in his place would have declared the imminence of the strikes and the Soviet Union would have launched their missiles towards every major city in the USA. The USA would have retaliated and the world would have been quite diffrent today.


Here is the link