Who will be the Stanislav Petrov in your organization?

In September 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker south of Moscow watching his early-warning screens light up with five incoming American missiles, and instead of phoning it up the chain he decided the computer was lying and waited — a judgment call that historians now credit with preventing a retaliatory nuclear launch

Just after midnight on 26 September 1983, an alarm sounded inside the Serpukhov-15 command bunker south of Moscow. A satellite feed from the Soviet Union’s new early-warning system, Oko, reported that the United States had launched a nuclear missile. Within minutes it reported four more. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, had a screen in front of him with the word LAUNCH in Cyrillic, a bank of phones connecting him to the …

Who will be the Stanislav Petrov in your organization?

The recent news coverage of “rogue AI” systems hacking innocent companies reminded me of one of the world’s most unsung heroes and genuinely someone who may well have saved the world. In 1983, the USSR’s early warning systems reported that the United States had launched nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, did something computers still struggle to do. He applied context, experience, and human judgemen…