Recognise this guy? Probably not, but because of him you are alive today. This guy made a decision back in 1983 that basically saved the world. He was 5 minutes away from starting WWIII, he had the power to send in the missiles and when it came to the crunch he made the decision not to retaliate. And thank god he did.
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This is Stanislav Petrov and I'd like to buy him a beer one day
Half an hour past midnight on September 26, 1983, he saw the first apparent launch on his computer monitor in a glass-walled room on the top floor of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) command and control post.
The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union. The START command Petrov was expected to give would have started an irreversible chain reaction in a system geared to launch a counter-strike without human interference.
Read the full story here, it's kinda scary that we came this close.
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