The man who saved the world

Click here to read a brief description in the new issue of The Humanist of Stanislav Petrov, who averted a potential nuclear war in 1983 when he decided to inform his Krimlin liaison that an alert in the Soviet Union's main command bunker south of Moscow warning that two Inter-Continental Ballistic missiles had been launched from the United States was a false alarm.

The alert was a false alarm, but Petrov had no way of knowing that for certain at the time. His instincts may have, quite literally, saved the world from a deadly nuclear war.