The date was September 26, 1983. A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces sat at his command station in Serpukhov-15 as sirens blared, indicating nuclear missiles had been launched from the United States. As you may have surmised by the fact you’re reading this in 2020, no missiles were fired by either side in the Cold War that day. Credit for this goes to Stanislav Petrov, who made the judgement call that the reports were a false alarm, preventing an all-out nuclear war between the two world powers. Today, we’ll look at what caused the false alarm, and why Petrov was able to correctly surmise that what he was seeing was an illusion.
Detecting Missiles By Infrared
Stanislav Petrov pictured at his home in 2016.
Petrov was in charge of monitoring the Oko early warning satellite network, which consisted of a series of satellites in highly elliptical Molniya orbits. This orbit was cleverly chosen by Soviet scientists to allow the Oko satellites to have a grazing view of the continental United States, which presented the biggest threat of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack at the time. By glancing across the Earth’s edge with their infrared sensors, rather than gazing down upon it, the infrared energy from hot missile exhaust could easily be spotted against the cold background of space, rather than the Earth’s surface. The aim was to cut down on false positives from phenomena such as wildfires and oil rig burnoffs, while also providing good coverage without requiring a large number of satellites.
On that fateful night in September, however, the unique orbit of the Soviet satellite was to cause a major problem. The Oko system raised an alarm sh ..
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