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Cold War: Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov averted a potential nuclear war by identifying as a false alarm signals that appeared to indicate an impending U.S. missile attack.
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Cold War
1947–1991 geopolitical rivalry between US and USSR
The Cold War was a period of global geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which began in the aftermath of the Second World War and ended with the…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
Stanislav Petrov
Soviet Air Defence Forces officer (1939–2017)
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident
Incident which nearly precipitated nuclear warfare
On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear early warning system Oko reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by…Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)