1983 SOVIET FLASE ALEAM

0n 26 September 1983,during the cold war. any sign of aggression could have triggered nuclear attacks between the United States and the Soviet Union both.

Both sides ready for war Soviet officer Stanislav Petrol was on duty at the bunker that contained "Oko," the early-warning satellite system that detected the false alarm,

Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union's early-warning satellite system.

when the alarm bells went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

Russia’s fear of surprise attack was accentuated in 1983, when the United States was due to deploy the Pershing II and land-based cruise missiles in Western Europe as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS-20 Pioneer missile. The SS-20 was not a “strategic” weapon because of its limited range (3,000 miles) well short of the United States.

Even so,from a US perspective the USSR' s millitary strenght wwas formidable and in washington there was a perception of amissile gap that simply had to be closed. By 1983,the societ union had 7300 strategic nuclear warheads capable

Given the heightened tensions between the two countries -- the alarm coincided with the beginning of provocative NATO military exercises and barely three weeks after the Russians shot down a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet air space -- Petrov could have been forgiven for believing the signal was accurate.

That job was on the Soviet early-warning system codenamed Oko, or Eye, whose function was to detect the launch of an American nuclear attack.

Its command center was inside a massive bunker beneath the secret city of Serpukhov-15, just south of Moscow. Having helped design and install the facility, Petrov was at the controls on the night of Sept. 26, 1983, when the sirens inside the bunker began to wail.

It was a tense moment in Cold War History. Over the Sea of Japan, a Soviet jet had mistakenly shot down a civilian airliner only three weeks earlier, killing all 269 people on board, among them a U.S. congressman and 61 other Americans.

Six months before that, President Ronald Reagan had announced plans for a European missile defense system, which the Kremlin saw as a major threat to its nuclear arsenal.

Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief who had become the leader of the Soviet Union the year before, was known for his paranoia about an American pre-emptive strike taking out his missile silos.

So both sides were on high alert when the Oko system’s satellites spotted the launch of an American ballistic missile, followed in quick succession by four others.

It was up to Petrov to confirm the incoming attack to the Soviet leaders, who would then launch a retaliatory strike while the U.S. missiles were still in the air. “I thought the chances were 50-50 that the warnings were real,” he recalls.

“But I didn’t want to be the one responsible for starting a third world war.” So he told his commanders that the alarm was false. After a six-month investigation, Petrov and his colleagues discovered the reason for the mix-up: Soviet satellites had mistaken the sun’s reflection in some clouds for the start of an American missile salvo.

“Can you imagine?

It was as though a child had been playing with a vanity mirror, throwing around the sun’s reflection,” he explained. “And by chance that blinding light landed right in the center of the system’s eye.”

This discovery – and the seeming randomness of the events that brought the world so close to catastrophe – would shadow him for the rest of his life.

But on the day he spoke to TIME, he wanted to talk about the present, not the past. Relations between the U.S. and Russia at the time of that interview had grown almost as cold as they were when Petrov held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the 1980s.

In the final years of his life, he said he saw the world tumbling again toward the type of nuclear standoffs that could kill millions of people in the span of an hour – not by design but by accident.

“The slightest false move can lead to colossal consequences,” he told me. “That hasn’t changed.”

Between 1985 and 1988,they met four times.at the 1986 Reykjavik summit, they agreed to try to abolish all nuclear weapons.

In 1987, they did sign Intermediate Range Nuclear force treaty, which ended a class of nuclear weapon.

TIME on September 20, 2017

Stanislav Petrov, the retired officer of the Soviet Air Defense Forces whose death at the age of 77 was announced this week, did not enjoy discussing the day he averted a nuclear holocaust.