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The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith review – inside the cold war mind

The psychology behind an age of nuclear brinkmanship that terrified a generation

The world as we know it might have ended in September 1983. It didn’t, thanks to the gut instinct of Lt Col Stanislav Petrov, who was the base commander of the Serpukhov-15 missile alert centre outside Moscow. When alerts flashed on to their computer screens warning that five US Minuteman nuclear-armed missiles had been launched at the Soviet Union, protocols dictated that Petrov should have instantly notified the Kremlin, so that General Secretary Yuri Andropov could authorise a massive retaliatory strike.

Instead Petrov went through 30 levels of additional checks on the data. They confirmed that a single base had indeed launched its missiles. And yet still he hesitated before picking up the hotline to the Kremlin: “For two or three minutes, I didn’t analyse anything. I was left with my intuition. I had two arguments. First of all, why would the US launch a rocket attack from a single base? They’d fire from everywhere. Secondly, the computer is an idiot. There’s no telling what it might think is a launch.”

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