The Washington Post Editorial | Tuesday September 19, 2017
He was often called "the man who saved the world," and in some sense, he did. On the night of Sept. 26, 1983, in a period of Cold War tension, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel on duty at a missile attack early-warning center south of Moscow, was jolted by an alarm of a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile attack on the Soviet Union.