Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "See ex-Trump admin. official's reaction to bombshell Trump book" video.
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Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union's Air Defense Forces, and his job was to monitor his country's satellite system, which was looking for any possible nuclear weapons launches by the United States.
He was on the overnight shift in the early morning hours of Sept. 26, 1983, when the computers sounded an alarm, indicating that the U.S. had launched five nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Petrov was in charge of a Soviet nuclear early warning center. Rather than retaliate, and instead of following orders, Stanislav followed his gut feeling and went against protocol, convincing the Soviet military that it was a false alarm. And it turned out to be exactly that, a false alarm. His decision saved the world from a potential devastating nuclear holocaust.
Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis recalled Petrov's actions in an interview on NPR:
"Petrov just had this feeling in his gut that it wasn't right. It was five missiles. It didn't seem like enough. So even though by all of the protocols he had been trained to follow, he should absolutely have reported that up the chain of command and, you know, we should be talking about the great nuclear war of 1983 if any of us survived."
After several nervous minutes, Petrov didn't send the computer warning to his superiors. He checked to see if there had been a computer malfunction.
He had guessed correctly.
"Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened," he said in 2013. "If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief."
Petrov received an official reprimand for breaking protocol and making mistakes in his logbook on Sept. 26, 1983.
He received a number of international awards during the final years of his life. In 2015, a docudrama about him featuring Kevin Costner was called "The Man Who Saved The World."
But he never considered himself a hero.
"That was my job," he said. "But they were lucky it was me on shift that night."
America and the rest of the world are lucky we had Gen. Mark Milley as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Trump lost the election.
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