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Hi, I'm Mike Troy, host of the American Revolution Podcast on the Airwave Media Network.

This podcast is the origin story of the United States, how we went from colonies ruled by a king to the Democratic Republic that we have today.

The American Revolution podcast tells the story of the revolution from beginning to end. The Revolution

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I hope you will join me today on the American Revolution podcast. September 26th, 1983 at a quarter past midnight Moscow time.

Stanislav Petrov, the deputy director for combat algorithms at the Russian Ground Command and Control Center was about to decide

whether five Scintillians on his screen,

which looked like specs of glitter against a tuxedo jacket, were intercontinental ballistic missiles,

the first volley in a surprise American nuclear attack against the Soviet Union listened on the nuclear party line that the Soviets had set up, waiting for his answer.

For all he know, Urian drop-off, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union at the time in 1983,

had already been notified.

As the clock ticked, as data came in for him for Petrov, time slowed down. He was a rational man, a trained engineer young enough to be skeptical of Kremlin propaganda about the United States. He understood the rhetorical games that both

sides played. 21 days earlier, of course, a Soviet Army Air Defense

fighter on patrol had destroyed a Korean passenger plane that it

mistook for an American spy plane.

Two hundred and 29 innocents had died.

The Soviets recovered only their shoes.

Ties between Moscow and Washington froze.

The Americans had just finished a NATO exercised, reforger, where they deployed 15,000 troops to Western Europe in record time, the biggest rehearsal of that type that the Soviets had ever seen.

...