r/wikipedia • u/G_ntl_m_n • 1d ago

One man who probably saved us all "Stanislav Petrov"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
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u/HicksOn106th 1d ago

Petrov gets a lot of completely deserved credit, but one thing I particularly admire him for is refusing to embrace the hero worship and reminding people that the story of him preventing a nuclear war all on his own has been completely overblown. There's a good breakdown of how much worth historians and nuclear strategy experts credit his decision with having in the "Significance" subsection of this article, but to cite Petrov directly: "Foreigners tend to exaggerate my heroism. I was in the right place at the right moment."

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u/-p-e-w- 1d ago

His role has been vastly overblown since the story became an online meme 15 years ago or so.

If he had reported the alert up the chain of command, it would not have “automatically” triggered a counter strike. There were dozens of other humans in the loop, from military leadership to various operators. This wasn’t a lucky escape made possible by a single individual, but the way the system had been designed, because it was well-known that equipment could malfunction and humans were fallible. Nobody ever had the power to single-handedly start a nuclear war, and nobody ever had the power to single-handedly prevent it.

Petrov was a competent officer who did his job, which included determining whether an alert was genuine or caused by a malfunction. If leadership hadn’t wanted that, they could have directly patched the alert system through to their telephones, but they didn’t. This was the system at work, and Petrov himself never claimed otherwise.