The Archive · 26 September 1983 · A bunker near Moscow
Stanislav Petrov and the false alarm of 1983: what would you have done?
What do you report?
The case
Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.
- Just after midnight. You are the duty officer in a bunker near Moscow. You watch the new satellite warning system.
- The siren goes. The screen says LAUNCH: one missile from the United States. Then four more.
- The rule is to report it up the line at once. Your leaders would have minutes to decide whether to fire back.
- The system is new, and ground radar shows nothing yet. Nobody above you can see what you see.
The two calls
- An attack.Follow the rule. Report the launch. What happens next is no longer yours to decide.
- A false alarm.Report a fault, and wait. If you are wrong, the missiles land in minutes.
Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.
What happened
Stanislav Petrov reported a false alarm. He was right. Sunlight on high cloud had fooled the satellites.
He was reprimanded: he had not written the alarm in his logbook. He was moved to another post and passed over for promotion.
His reason: a real first strike would be hundreds of missiles, not five. The night stayed secret for about ten years.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Stanislav Petrov”. www.britannica.com/biography/Stanislav-Petrov
How to read this
History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.
Where the game asks it
The same kind of question runs through The Reconstruction (When should you obey?), one of the nine journeys of the game.
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