ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Just after midnight at Serpukhov-15 in 1983, Soviet early-warning satellites falsely reported a U.S. missile strike. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, facing urgent alarms and extreme time pressure, judged the alert implausible and reported it as a false alarm, waiting for corroboration that never came.
The episode shows how confident machines can be wrong and how one person’s judgment within a flawed system prevented escalation — a stark lesson about design, doctrine, and the fragile margins that separate continuity from catastrophe.
English
United States
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