Like many, I suspect, I remember hearing vaguely about a man who refused to launch a Soviet nuclear counterstrike - but I did not realise how close we were to :nuke:
http://maltastar.com/pages/msfullart.asp?an=15214/snip
It was a cold night at the Serpukhov-15 bunker in Moscow on 26 September 1983 as Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov resumed his duty, monitoring the skies of the Soviet Union, after taking a shift of someone else who couldn't go to work.
Just past midnight, Petrov received a computer report he'd dreaded all his military career to see, the computer captured a nuclear military missile being launched from the US, destination Moscow.
/snip
But then, seconds later, the situation turned extremely serious. A second missile was spotted by the satellite. The pressure by the officers in the bunker to commence responsive actions against America started growing. A third missile was spotted, followed by a fourth. A couple of seconds later, a fifth one was spotted... everyone in the bunker was agitated as the USSR was under missile attack.
The article says the soviet attack would have potentially "killed millions" an understatement if ever there was one.
Basically we are alive because this guy had the biggest pair of cojones imaginable. Remember he did not need launch codes, his actions would have been approves afterwards in the unlikely event that there was an afterwards. The US would have seen an all out nuclear strike launched and the President was Ronald "Star Wars""Evil Empire" Reagan do you think he would have hesitated before approving a counterstrike?
We, and I mean the whole world, owes this man our thanks.
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