Savior of the world dies

Do you know who Colonel Stanislav Petrov is?

Maybe we all should. Some have labelled him as the man who saved the world.

Petrov was in charge of Soviet nuclear early warning systems on the night of September 26, 1983, and decided not to retaliate when a false "missile attack" signal appeared to show a US nuclear launch. He is feted by nuclear activists as the man who "saved the world" by determining that the Soviet system had been spoofed by a reflection off the Earth.

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In some respects, this scares me more than the Cuban Missile Crisis ever did.

Colonel Petrov died back in May.

I sometimes forget that getting past that time in our history consisted of ugliness *and* of heroism on all sides. This is one of those instances where I tip the hat to the Soviets.