The 23rd anniversary of the world not being destroyed

Wikipedia is one of my favorite sites. In its pages are an impossible wealth of information about darn near anything. For instance, on September 26th, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier monitoring his country's satellite early warning system, averted a fullscale nuclear war.

A few weeks before, their air force had shot down a Korean airliner that had strayed too far into Soviet airspace. 269 passengers had died onboard that plane, many of them American. The KGB at that time sent out a message to all their operatives, telling them to prepare for a nuclear attack. The entire government was on edge, preparing for a quick retaliation from an attack, and had a hairtrigger mentality. At 12:40 in the morning, Stanislov Petrov saw on his early warning system an American missile (which was a glitch in the computer). He had a few moments to inform his superiors of an imminent nuclear attack, but figured that if America was going to launch a nuclear attack, they'd send a lot of missiles all at once, not just one lone missile. He saw another one, and another, a total of five missiles being launched, all of which were computer glitches. He chose to trust his intuition and his instincts over his training, and saved the world from a nuclear cataclysm.

For disobeying orders and avoiding Armageddon, he was not rewarded, but neither was he severely punished. He was given a reprimand for improper filing of paperwork and reassigned to a less sensitive post, as his superiors found him to be unreliable. He now is retired in a small Russian town, and does not consider himself the hero that he is.

This information was made public in 1996, but very few people know about it. In 2004, he was awarded the World Citizen Award and given US$1000. In early 2006, he recived another World Citizen Award in a trip to the United Nations. A documentary will be realeased shortly (late 2006), called The Man Who Saved the World.

Incidentally, three months before was the movie WarGames, in which American missile command was given over to a computer, and through a series of apparent glitches in the program, a nuclear disaster almost happened. A few months after the event, ABC released the miniseries The Day After, in which people were suffering from the aftermath of a American/Soviet nuclear war.