[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 162 (Tuesday, October 15, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1282-E1283]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE MAN WHO SAVED MANKIND

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. JOE WILSON

                           of south carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 15, 2019

  Mr. WILSON of South Carolina. Madam Speaker, South Carolina is 
fortunate to have Mark Powell as a columnist for the Lexington County 
Chronicle to highlight unique facts of history. On October 10th, he 
recognized ``The man who saved mankind''.
  An elderly Russian man was quietly laid to rest outside Moscow last 
spring. No crowd mourned him. No news articles reported his passing. 
Yet, if you're age 36 or older, you are alive to read this because of 
him. And you've never even heard his name.
  This is what happened the night Stanislav Petrov saved the world.
  It all started in the late 1970s. The United States and the Soviet 
Union faced off in the Cold War. President Jimmy Carter's foreign 
policy vacillated between sometimes talking tough, sometimes going out 
of its way to accommodate the Soviets. Moscow smelled weakness.
  So the Soviets deployed their new SS-20 nuclear missiles. The North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) upped the ante by announcing it 
would deploy its powerful Pershing II missiles in Western Europe by 
1983 in response.
  Suddenly, it felt like we were living in Armageddon's shadow. If you 
are of a certain age, you'll remember massive anti-nuclear war rallies 
in the northeast U.S. and Europe, some attracting hundreds of thousands 
of protestors. A TV movie about a post-nuclear attack called The Day 
After got huge ratings. Rock music songs that played on nuclear fears 
such as The Final Countdown, It's A Mistake, and 99 Red Balloons were 
big hits. People were on edge.
  Which brings us to September 1983. Early that month, the USSR shot 
down an unarmed Korean Air Lines jetliner over Soviet airspace, killing 
all 239 people onboard--including an American congressman from Georgia. 
East-West relations were indeed tense.
  At that precise moment Stanislav Petrov unknowingly entered the world 
stage.
  A 44 year-old Air Force lieutenant colonel and father of two, he 
served in the Soviet's prestigious Air Defense Forces. He was part of 
the elite team that monitored the Russians' satellites which, in turn, 
kept an eye out for nuclear missile launches by the U.S. via a spiffy 
new state-of-the-art computerized system.
  Petrov worked the overnight shift. Early on the morning of September 
26, the unthinkable happened. ``The siren howled,'' he recalled in a 
2013 interview. ``I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the 
big, backlit, red screen with the word `launch' on it.''

[[Page E1283]]

  But something wasn't right. The system showed five missiles heading 
for the Soviet Union. Petrov's training had indicated that if a nuclear 
strike came, dozens of warheads would rain down on Russia, not just 
five.
  What was going on? Time wasn't on Petrov's side. Every minute he 
spent trying to figure it out was a minute weapons might be speeding 
toward his sleeping homeland.
  And nobody in the entire Soviet Union was aware of it--except 
Stanislov Petrov. His standing order was to immediately notify the 
Kremlin's big brass in such an emergency. His gut instinct told him to 
wait. As he was making up his mind, the word ``launch'' flashed in his 
face.
  In the end, he didn't notify his superiors as protocol required. Had 
he done so, they likely would have ordered a massive retaliatory strike 
on the United States, very probably ending life as we know it. Instead, 
he waited. ``Twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had 
happened,'' he said. ``If there had been a real strike, then I would 
already know about it. It was such a relief.''
  It was the closest the world had come to an actual nuclear conflict 
since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
  It turned out Petrov's instinct was right. The computer system had 
malfunctioned. At first his superiors were pleased with his coolness 
amid the ultimate crisis. But the Soviets were world-class bureaucrats, 
and he was later reprimanded for not filling out the required paperwork 
while the crisis was underway. ``I had a phone in one hand and the 
intercom in the other, and I don't have a third hand {for filling out 
forms),'' he said.
  Petrov eventually left the military to work for the very research 
institute that designed the faulty monitoring system. He suffered a 
mental breakdown due to the emotional trauma he had experienced, 
recovered, and eventually retired to tend to his wife during her final 
battle with cancer.
  He was living alone when he died quietly at age 77 last May 19, such 
an obscure figure that news of his passing wasn't learned until just a 
few weeks ago.
  ``They were lucky it was me on shift that night,'' Stanislav Petrov 
once said. That's putting it mildly.

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