The Man Who Didn't Push the Button: Stanislav Petrov, 1983 — Transcript

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1. 0:00September 26th, 1983, past midnight. A
2. 0:04bunker south of Moscow called Serpukov
3. 0:0615, buried under concrete and cold
4. 0:09earth. One man sits at the center
5. 0:12console of the Soviet Union's nuclear
6. 0:14early warning system. Lieutenant Colonel
7. 0:16Stannislov Petro. Around him, screens
8. 0:20glow green. The OO satellite network
9. 0:22watches the skies above North America,
10. 0:25scanning for the infrared bloom of an
11. 0:27ICBM launch. Tonight, the system will
12. 0:30tell him America has started a nuclear
13. 0:32war. He will have minutes, maybe less,
14. 0:35to decide what to do about it. Three
15. 0:38weeks earlier, a Soviet SU15 interceptor
16. 0:41had shot Korean Airlines Flight Zero 7
17. 0:44out of the sky, killing all 269 people
18. 0:48aboard. The world was furious. Reagan
19. 0:51called the USSR an evil empire. Soviet
20. 0:54leadership dug in, convinced a NATO
21. 0:56first strike was plausible. This was the
22. 0:59closest the superpowers had come to open
23. 1:01confrontation since Cuba in 1962.
24. 1:04Both sides had thousands of warheads on
25. 1:07hair trigger alert. The doctrine was
26. 1:09launch on warning. If satellites
27. 1:12detected incoming missiles, you fired
28. 1:14yours before they landed. And the
29. 1:16officer responsible for interpreting
30. 1:18those satellite signals on the Soviet
31. 1:19side, the man whose report would begin
32. 1:22the chain of retaliation, that was
33. 1:24whoever sat the overnight shift at
34. 1:26Serpov 15. On this particular night, it
35. 1:29was Petro. Petro was not a typical
36. 1:32Soviet military officer. Born in 1939
37. 1:35near Vladivvastto, the son of a World
38. 1:38War II fighter pilot and a nurse, he had
39. 1:41graduated from the Kiev Military
40. 1:42Aviation Engineering Academy in 1972, an
41. 1:46engineering school, not a command
42. 1:49academy. He understood the OK systems
43. 1:51hardware. He knew its tolerances, its
44. 1:54blind spots, its newness. He later said
45. 1:57this mattered more than anything.
46. 2:00My colleagues were purely military men.
47. 2:03They would have reported a strike. Petro
48. 2:06thought like an engineer. Just after
49. 2:09midnight, the siren screamed. The main
50. 2:11screen flashed a single word in red
51. 2:14cerillic. Launch.
52. 2:17The OO system reported one American ICBM
53. 2:20rising from North Dakota. Petrov's
54. 2:22standing orders were explicit. Report
55. 2:24the detection up the chain immediately.
56. 2:26Soviet protocol left no room for
57. 2:28personal judgment at his level. But
58. 2:31Petrov hesitated. one missile. A genuine
59. 2:35American first strike would be all out.
60. 2:37Hundreds of warheads, maybe thousands,
61. 2:40launched simultaneously to overwhelm
62. 2:42Soviet defenses. One missile made no
63. 2:44strategic sense. Then the system
64. 2:46reported a second launch, a third, a
65. 2:49fourth, a fifth. Five missiles now,
66. 2:52arcing from the Great Plains toward
67. 2:54Soviet territory. The operators at their
68. 2:56monitoring stations turned to look at
69. 2:58him. The alarm pulsed red across their
70. 3:01faces.
71. 3:02Petro's reasoning held. Five was still
72. 3:06wrong. The United States had over a
73. 3:08thousand ICBMs.
74. 3:10You don't start World War II with five.
75. 3:13The OO system was new, barely tested in
76. 3:15real conditions, and it had passed
77. 3:17through 30 layers of verification
78. 3:19suspiciously fast. Too fast. And
79. 3:22groundbased radar, the systems
80. 3:24independent check, showed nothing.
81. 3:27Minutes passed. Still nothing on radar.
82. 3:31If missiles were actually in flight,
83. 3:33ground stations should have picked them
84. 3:34up by now. He picked up the phone and
85. 3:37reported a system malfunction, not a
86. 3:40strike, a malfunction. He was never
87. 3:43certain. He said so himself years later.
88. 3:46He was never sure the alarm was wrong.
89. 3:50He made a judgment call against
90. 3:51protocol, against his orders, against
91. 3:54the entire doctrine of the Soviet
92. 3:56nuclear apparatus. And then he waited to
93. 3:59find out if he was right. What would
94. 4:01have happened if Petro had followed
95. 4:03orders. Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear
96. 4:07security expert formerly with the Center
97. 4:09for Defense Information, put it plainly.
98. 4:12Top Soviet leadership, given only a
99. 4:14couple of minutes and told an attack was
100. 4:16confirmed, would have made a decision to
101. 4:18retaliate. The machinery existed for
102. 4:21exactly this scenario. Detect, confirm,
103. 4:25launch. Petrov broke the chain at the
104. 4:27first link. Other scholars push back.
105. 4:31Pavl Podvig, a nuclear security
106. 4:33researcher, argues there were at least
107. 4:35three decision layers above Petrov's
108. 4:37command center, and the USSR would only
109. 4:40have launched after actual nuclear
110. 4:42explosions on its territory. The red
111. 4:45button, Petro himself later, was never
112. 4:48made operational. Military psychologists
113. 4:51refuse to put the decision to end
114. 4:53civilization in one person's hands. But
115. 4:56Podvig's argument assumes rational
116. 4:58actors at every level of a system under
117. 5:01maximum stress in the middle of the
118. 5:03night 3 weeks after a geopolitical
119. 5:06crisis. That is a lot of assumptions
120. 5:09when the stakes are measured in hundreds
121. 5:10of millions of lives. The cause was
122. 5:13eventually found. A rare alignment of
123. 5:16sunlight reflecting off high altitude
124. 5:18clouds above North Dakota combined with
125. 5:20the specific orbital geometry of the
126. 5:22Molnia satellites had produced infrared
127. 5:25signatures that looked exactly like
128. 5:27missile launches. The fix was
129. 5:29straightforward cross reference with a
130. 5:31geostationary satellite at a different
131. 5:33angle, a software patch, a calibration
132. 5:36error. Petrov was not rewarded. He was
133. 5:40not punished either. Publicly
134. 5:42acknowledging the incident would have
135. 5:44meant admitting the flagship early
136. 5:45warning system was flawed. He was
137. 5:48quietly reassigned. His wife Rya died of
138. 5:51cancer in 1997. He lived in a small
139. 5:55apartment outside Moscow. The world
140. 5:57learned his name only in 1998 when a
141. 6:00retired Soviet colonel mentioned the
142. 6:02incident in his memoirs. Petro died on
143. 6:05May 19th, 2017. Largely unknown in his
144. 6:09own country. One engineer, one night,
145. 6:12one judgment call against the machine.
146. 6:15The system said launch. He said no.