Should he alert his superiors or dismiss the attack as a false alarm? It was and still is the policy of Russia to launch a second-strike attack, meaning that if Stanislav had reported the incident to his superiors they would have almost certainly retaliated with their own nuclear strike. It would prove to be a fateful duty for Stanislav because shortly after midnight the computers in the station detected an American missile heading towards the Soviets. The man in question was Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty in the Soviet's nuclear early warning command centre.Ĭode-named 'Oko', meaning eye, it collated information from multiple satellites in geosynchronous orbits that endlessly monitored the skies for ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads on their way to attack the Soviet Union.
On the evening of September the 26th, 1983, the actions, or possibly inactions, of a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces would change the course of history. As increased resources are announced for nuclear weapons under the Integrated Review, here, BFBS explores a weapon that changed the world and the course of history - the Atomic Bomb.
