Stanislav Petrov, ex-Soviet officer ‘who saved the world’ by averting nuclear war, dies aged 77

Karl Schumacher, a German political activist who publicised Petrov’s story back in the late 1990s, said he learned of the former Soviet military officer’s death when he contacted Petrov’s home.

“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” Petrov was quoted as saying by BBC’s Russian Service in 2013. “I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it,” Petrov said.

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time; that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay,” he told the BBC.

With his computer suggesting that five nuclear missiles were on their way to Moscow, Petrov had the privilege of mere 20 minutes to launch a counter-attack. However, he informed his superior officers that it was a false alarm.

Petrov’s son Dmitry said his father had died on May 19, 2017.