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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On September 26, 1983, Luton about the past, rediscovered.

On September 26, 1983,

Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union's air defense forces was sitting in the commander's chair on overnight duty

in a secret bunker southwest of Moscow.

His job was to monitor his country's early warning satellites over the United States.

Just after midnight, the sirens began blaring.

They were alerting him that the U.S. had just launched a nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union.

A second missile was launched, then another, then two more.

A red button on the panel in front of him flashed the word,

start.

On his computer screen was the word launch in red, bold letters.

He had only minutes, if not seconds, to act. His decision that day undoubtedly

changed the world. Stanislav Petrov died in 2017 in relative obscurity. He had been living on a small pension in a town outside Moscow.

His funeral was attended by only a handful of family members.

The story of what he did that day in 1983 wasn't even known publicly until the late 1990s.

Military Protocol known publicly until the late 1990s.

Military protocol instructed him to tell his commanders that five intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched against them by the United States so that the Soviet government could plan a counterattack.

In a 2014 documentary called The Man Who Saved the World, Petrov remembered that seconds felt like minutes and minutes stretched for eternity.

But he knew something didn't feel right about those warnings.

...