1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident

These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system.

They included clandestine naval operations in the Barents, Norwegian, Black and Baltic Sea and near the GIUK gap, as well as flights by American bombers, occasionally several times per week, directly toward Soviet airspace that turned away only at the last moment.

"[2]From the accounts of CIA and senior KGB officers,[3][4] by May 1981, obsessed with historical parallels with the 1941 German invasion and Reaganite rhetoric, and with no defensive capability against the Pershing IIs, Soviet leaders believed the United States was preparing a secret nuclear attack on the USSR and initiated Operation RYaN.

[10] Petrov's responsibilities included observing the satellite early-warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union.

If notification was received from the early-warning systems that inbound missiles had been detected, the Soviet Union's strategy was an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning), specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a first-strike nuclear attack by the United States was likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means of a counterattack.

[11] In addition, the launch detection system was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had failed to pick up corroborative evidence even after several minutes of the false alarm.

[11] Petrov himself stated he was initially praised by Votintsev and was promised a reward,[11][10] but recalled that he was also reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork with the pretext that he had not described the incident in the military diary.

According to Petrov, this was because the incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the influential scientists who were responsible for it, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had to be punished.

[11][10][16][17] He was reassigned to a less sensitive post,[16] took early retirement (although he emphasized that he was not "forced out" of the army, as is sometimes claimed by Western sources),[10] and suffered a nervous breakdown.