![]() ![]() If he had been wrong, and he somehow survived the American nuclear strike, he likely would’ve been executed for treason. Preventing the deaths of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people was a costly decision for Petrov. Petrov, almost single-handedly, prevented those deaths. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War put the potential death toll from starvation at about 2 billion. Proportional to world population, it would be rivaled only by the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China and the Mongol conquests of the 13th century.Īnd it’s likely hundreds of millions more would have died once the conflict disrupted global temperatures and severely hampered agriculture. The combined death toll there (between 136 million and 288 million) swamps the death toll of any war, genocide, or other violent catastrophe in human history. The inevitable US counterstrike would kill 20 to 40 percent of the Soviet population, or between 54 million and 108 million people. Petrov prevented a nuclear war between the Soviets, who had 35,804 nuclear warheads in 1983, and the US, which had 23,305.Ī 1979 report by Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment estimated that a full-scale Soviet assault on the US would kill 35 to 77 percent of the US population - or between 82 million and 180 million people in 1983. And it was the system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile. He and others on his staff concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. ![]() Take Vox’s survey here.īut Petrov did not report the incoming strike. We want to get to know you better - and learn what your needs are. There were reasons for Petrov to think Reagan’s brinkmanship had escalated to an actual nuclear exchange. Months earlier President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (mockingly dubbed “Star Wars,” a plan to shoot down ballistic missiles before they reached the US), and his administration was in the process of deploying Pershing II nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, which were capable of striking the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration had a far more hardline stance against the Soviets than the Carter, Ford, or Nixon administrations before it. Reporting it would have made a certain degree of sense. “If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US.” “Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike?” my then-colleague Max Fisher explained. First, it was just one missile, but then another, and another, until the system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched. Stanislav Petrov, that it could say with “high reliability” that an American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched and was headed toward the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s missile attack early warning system displayed, in large red letters, the word “LAUNCH” a computer screen stated to the officer on duty, Soviet Lt. On September 26, 1983, the planet came terrifyingly close to a nuclear holocaust. Editor’s note, September 26, 2022: This article has been updated to reflect recent nuclear tensions between the US and Russia. ![]()
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