Today is Stanislav Petrov day
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thoughtful
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Stanislav Petrov
nuclear history
cold war
heroism
The community is celebrating Stanislav Petrov Day, honoring the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war by correctly identifying a false alarm, and discussing the details and implications of the event.
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- 01Story posted
9/26/2025, 3:20:47 PM
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9/26/2025, 3:20:47 PM
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9/27/2025, 8:42:01 PM
52d ago
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42 years ago today, lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov chose not to launch missiles against the United States while on duty in the Serpukhov-15 missile bunker after receiving what he correctly judged to be a false alarm in a early warning system.
This hasn't been formalized into a holiday so you'll find different advice online about how to celebrate, but I intend to raise a toast to Petrov and to watch the movie WarGames released the same year.
"It was subsequently determined that the false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite."
Wikipedia article you linked: "Dead Hand [...] is a Cold War–era automatic or semi-automatic nuclear weapons control system [...] that was constructed by the Soviet Union. The system remains in use in the post-Soviet Russian Federation. An example of fail-deadly and mutual assured destruction deterrence, it can initiate the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by sending a pre-entered highest-authority order from the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Strategic Missile Force Management to command posts and individual silos if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity, and pressure sensors even with the commanding elements fully destroyed."
I have no idea how you got from "automated nuclear weapons launch system" to "prevents hasty decisions". Seems like the opposite to me: an incredibly irresponsible system that has more of a chance of responding to a false positive than, demonstrably, human operators.
Meanwhile this case was a false satellite detection which, if reported, may have caused a retaliatory launch of nukes.
One might hope that the US has also passed the USSR/Russia technology that would make Perimeter more robust and logically airtight.
Edit: I see it here.
>In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five missiles seemed an illogical start.[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.
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