Here's the site he did it from: http://goo.gl/maps/bpWiB
...
Little shiver down my spine on this one.
What would have happened if he were a Jihadi?
Ruskies will probably kill him now
That was a bone-cruncher of a decision. I’m glad he got it right.
If that’s your focus, I guess you’re very much in tune with these types of matters, and perhaps it wasn’t all that hard of a decision.
I do think he’s deserving of this award. Kudos to him.
Lately, I’ve been wishing I was back in the days of the Cold War.
Scary time, but we were on the side of the good guys and we won.
?? Was this the same time period as the KAL shootdown?
One thing that can definitely not be said of the Russians is that they are stupid. Barbaric, yes, but not stupid.
There was more than one incident which almost caused a war during that period. The soviets were an adversary, but they were rational. With our current muslim adversaries, we are not dealing with a rational actor.
Good for him.
But frankly it is pretty obvious that if anybody is going to launch a first strike, they’re going to do so with everything they have available.
Unless they are really, really stupid.
> Soviet Officer Wins Award for Preventing Nuclear War
Boyrock Hyssain Ohaha wants that award now.
This is the guy who should have received Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
There are have been more than one close calls, and it is by the grace of God that it has not happened.
Also from the linked Operation Able Archer article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83), which provides historical context and give this story of Petrov more depth:
Upon learning that US nuclear activity mirrored its hypothesized first strike activity, the Moscow Centre sent its residencies a flash telegram on November 8 or 9 (Oleg Gordievsky cannot recall which), incorrectly reporting an alert on American bases and frantically asking for further information regarding an American first strike. The alert precisely coincided with the seven- to ten-day period estimated between NATO’s preliminary decision and an actual strike.[33] This was the peak of the war scare.
The Soviet Union, believing its only chance of surviving a NATO strike was to preempt it, readied its nuclear arsenal. The CIA reported activity in the Baltic Military District, in Czechoslovakia, and it determined that nuclear capable aircraft in Poland and East Germany were placed “on high alert status with readying of nuclear strike forces”.[9][34] Former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry goes further, saying he suspects that the aircraft were merely the tip of the iceberg. He hypothesizes that—in accordance with Soviet military procedure and history—ICBM silos, easily readied and difficult for the United States to detect, were also prepared for a launch.[35]
Soviet fears of the attack ended as the Able Archer exercise finished on November 11. Upon learning of the Soviet reaction to Able Archer 83 by way of the double agent Oleg Gordievsky, a British SIS asset, President Reagan commented, “I don’t see how they could believe that—but it’s something to think about.”[36]
According to Vitaly Shlykov, the Soviets started arming their nuclear weapons, and war was only averted because they malfunctioned when the wrong launch codes were entered[citation needed]
Some historians, including Beth A. Fischer in her book The Reagan Reversal, pin Able Archer 83 as profoundly affecting President Reagan and his turn from a policy of confrontation towards the Soviet Union to a policy of rapprochement. Most other historians say that Reagan always intended to increase the United States defensive ability and then negotiate with the Soviet Union from a position of strength. The thoughts of Reagan and those around him provide important insight upon the nuclear scare and its subsequent ripples. On October 10, 1983, just over a month before Able Archer 83, President Reagan viewed a television film about Lawrence, Kansas being destroyed by a nuclear attack titled The Day After. In his diary, the president wrote that the film “left me greatly depressed”.[41]
Later in October, Reagan attended a Pentagon briefing on nuclear war. During his first two years in office, he had refused to take part in such briefings, feeling it irreverent to rehearse a nuclear apocalypse; finally, he consented to the Pentagon official requests. According to officials present, the briefing “chastened” Reagan. Weinberg said, “[Reagan] had a very deep revulsion to the whole idea of nuclear weapons .
.. These war games brought home to anybody the fantastically horrible events that would surround such a scenario.” Reagan described the briefing in his own words: “A most sobering experience with [Caspar Weinberger] and Gen. Vessey in the Situation room, a briefing on our complete plan in the event of a nuclear attack.”[41][42]..
Secretary of State George P. Shultz thought it “incredible, at least to us” that the Soviets would believe the US would launch a genuine attack.[43] In general, Reagan did not share the secretary’s belief that cooler heads would prevail, writing:
“We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis... Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”
According to McFarlane, the president responded with “genuine anxiety” in disbelief that a regular NATO exercise could have led to an armed attack. To the ailing Politburo—led from the deathbed of the terminally ill Andropov, a man with no firsthand knowledge of the United States, and the creator of Operation RYAN—it seemed “that the United States was preparing to launch ... a sudden nuclear attack on the Soviet Union”.[13][45][46] In his memoirs, Reagan, without specifically mentioning Able Archer 83—he states earlier that he cannot mention classified information—wrote of a 1983 realization:
“Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did ... During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike ... Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us.”[47]
Yikes....
Yes, Petrov made a good decision.
And so did an American general in 1960.
When the newly-installed BMEWS radar detected something that looked like a ripple-fire ballistic missile launch from Russia — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 — a general at NORAD alerted SAC, and SAC went to DEFCON 2 (prepare for immediate launch). SAC alert aircrews scrambled to their planes, started engines, and waited for the launch message.
Then the general at NORAD told SAC, “Wait! Do not launch,” because the number of missiles kept increasing beyond all reason. After about 15 minutes, the aircrews were told to shut down engines and return to their barracks. (I was a B-47 navigator at Torrejon AB, Spain)
Explanation: the new BMEWS radar at Thule, Greenland, had detected the moon rising over Russia. The computers made the radar look again every few seconds and recorded the new return(s) in addition to the previous return(s).
There was also a Russian submarine officer Arkhipov, who refused to use nuclear torpedoes against American warships during the Cuban missile crisis. If not for his refusal, I don’t know where we’d be today.
Wow. Thanks for posting this.
I don’t think most people today under 40 realize just how close we came to nuclear war on multiple occasions. This is seriously scary stuff.
I remember this one, when it was made public. The Russians saw many dozens of heat plumes by satellite, and at the time, we were both awfully antsy. If I am not mistaken, NATO was on exercises, too, which incredibly increases tension.