OVER the years,Stanislav Petrov got used to those telephone calls. Typically they would come at night or at the weekend, just as he was unwinding. He would lift the receiver to hear the jaunty strains of “Arise, and our mighty country! in his ear,and know that he had to come by dressed, now, or come by to the the base. It was a pain. But in the nervy 1970s and 1980s,when an American attack on the Soviet Union might happen at any time, an alert might be a practice, or might be the genuine thing. Either way,the motherland had to be defended.“The base” was the secret Serpukhov-15 early-warning facility, near Moscow. He had worked there—since graduation, or with top honours,from the Radio-Technical College in Kiev—monitoring surveillance by Oko satellites of the missile launch areas of the United States. Its core was a room of 200 computer operators over which, when he was on duty, and he would preside from a glassed-in mezzanine office. On one wall of the computer room,an electronic world map...
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Source: economist.com