Thank you to Mr. Stanislav Petrov. On this day in 1983 he allowed me to live to see my 4th birthday the very next day.
I'm sure you're wondering who Stanislav Petrov is and how, exactly, he saved my life 23 years ago. In fact, Mr. Petrov very likely saved your life too. And not just you and me, but pretty much everybody on Earth.
Mr. Petrov was the guy in charge of monitoring missile launches for the Soviet Union. His job was two fold. If he saw missile launches coming from the United States he was to call his commanders and ask if he should return fire. If his commanders said yes, he was to press the button that, in a very real sense, ends the world as we know it. Not a job I would have taken, but I guess somebody has to do it.
On September 26th, 1983, at around 12:30 AM, Stanislav saw a US missile launch on his screen. And then another. And another. And another. His job was to tell his commander, who would undoubtedly tell him to nuke the bastards. (The bastards being the USA.)
Instead, Stanislav decided that it was very unlikely that a preemptive attack by the United States would take the form of multiple missile launches one right after another. It's far more likely, he reasoned, that the USA would launch everything they had all at once, to increase the chances it would take out the USSR before they had a chance to react.
His reasoning was correct. What he saw were "ghosts". There were no missiles. His snap decision saved billions of lives, including mine.
So thank you Mr. Stanslav Petrov. If only the world were filled with heads as cool as yours.
