This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States.

He quickly raised the temperature of the Cold War and assumed a muscular stance toward the Soviet Union.

Let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, they are the focus of

evil in the modern world.

That September, a message flashed in a secret bunker at Sopricov 15, a secret Soviet

outpost that analyzed satellite data from the United States.

Inside the bunker was a 44-year-old Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov.

The military commander saw a button pulsing red.

His panel told him the unimaginable had happened.

The United States had launched a ballistic missile.

Within minutes, the satellite data showed four more missiles had been launched.

It looked like the United States was trying to cripple the Soviet Union with a sudden deadly nuclear attack.

There were only seconds for the Soviets to launch strikes in response.

Stanislav Petrov debated whether to report the attack. If he did, it could have triggered

a massive Soviet response. The Soviet commander did not do what was expected of him. He decided the satellite data was wrong and did not report the missiles.

He was right. The satellite signals were reflections of sunlight of clouds.

You probably have never heard of Stanislav Petrov, but you might owe your life to him.

Retaliatory strikes could easily have killed half the populations of both countries.

Researchers have estimated that the nuclear winter that followed could have killed 2 billion people worldwide.

There is a lesson in the story about whether fallible human beings

should ever have nuclear weapons at their disposal.

But our focus today is on a psychological idea, how our minds work when we are under attack.

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