‘War is like love, it always finds a way.’ –Bertolt Brecht
On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early warning system of the Soviet Union twice reported the launch of American Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles from bases in the United States.
These missile attack warnings were correctly identified as a false alarm by Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack based on erroneous data on the United States and its NATO allies, which would have likely resulted in nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had malfunctioned.
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