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The man who saved the worldThe man who saved the world
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
Last week, former Soviet air defence commander Stanislav Petrov was awarded the Dresden Prize for preventing a nuclear war. Back in 1983, he determined that warnings of an incoming US nuclear missile strike were a false alarm as a result of a 'rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' designed to detect such launches.
The History Channel documentary below implies that, had Petrov passed on the warning, it would have triggered a Soviet counter-strike, though of course that would have been a decision for Soviet leaders, who presumably would have based their decision on more than a single source. Then again, those leaders would have assumed that they had only minutes to make a decision before possible annihilation.
Altogether, it's a pretty powerful argument for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence has prevented war between the great powers, but at the risk that perhaps a single human error could have catastrophic consequences.
Sam Roggeveen