THINKER'S ALMANAC - September 26

Given just five minutes and limited information, how did a Soviet colonel make a decision that saved millions of lives?

Subject: Decision Making - Petrov’s Life-Saving Decision

Event:  Stanislav Petrov saves the world, 1983

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. -Malcolm Gladwell

Imagine having to make a life-or-death decision that would decide not just your fate, but the fates of millions of other people?  To add a little more pressure to this decision-making process, imagine you are working with incomplete information and with the clock ticking; you have 25 minutes to make your decision.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

These were the circumstances of Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces on the morning of September 26, 1983.  Petrov’s mission that day was to monitor Russia’s early-warning satellites over the United States. It was the Cold War, and Petrov’s job was to be alert in the event that the U.S. launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) against Russia.

That morning a computer sounded an alarm, and the early warning system indicated that 5 Minuteman ICBMs had been launched by the U.S.  Petrov now had to make a decision. Was the early warning system correct?  By reporting an incoming American strike to his superiors, Petrov knew the Soviets would respond with full nuclear retaliation.

To make his decision Petrov relied on his training, which told him that a nuclear first strike would not begin with just 5 warheads; instead, it would begin with a massive number of warheads -- in 1983 the U.S. arsenal consisted of over 23,000 missiles.  Furthermore, radar installations in Russia were not detecting an attack.  Based on this limited information, Petrov contemplated his decision for an incredibly tense 5 minutes.  In the end, he concluded that the computer was registering a false alarm.  As a result, he did not report an attack.  

Fortunately for Petrov and the rest of the world, he was correct.  The Soviet early-warning system had mistaken the sun’s reflection off of clouds for an attack.  As a result of Petrov's cool thinking under pressure, he prevented the deaths of an estimated 136 to 288 million people.  For comparison, the total deaths in World War II amounted to 55 million (1).

For his decisive role in saving the world, you might think that the Soviets would have held a parade in his honor; instead, as recorded in his 2017 New York Times obituary, the hero received a reprimand for incomplete record keeping:

Colonel Petrov was at first praised for his calm, but in an investigation that followed, he was asked why he had failed to record everything in his logbook. “Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand,” he replied. (2)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What were the factors that Petrov needed to conspire for his choice to either A) launch missiles or B) ignore the early warning alarm?

Challenge - Decision Precision:  Do some research to find some quotations on decision-making.  Find the one quotation that gives the best insight or advice and how to make decisions or why decision-making is so important.  Explain why you think your quotation is so insightful.

Also on This Day: 

September 26, 1898:  Today is the birthday of Leonard E. Reed, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).  He is best known for his essay “I, Pencil” (1958), which traces the miracle of the free market from the first-person perspective of a pencil.    See Thinker’s Almanac - June 5.

September 26, 1960:  On this day, the first-ever televised presidential debate was held in Chicago between Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon.  More than 65 million viewers watched as the candidates squared off, revealing the power of television as a modern medium for politics.  Although radio listeners awarded the debate to Nixon, the much larger television audience gave the prize to Kennedy, who appeared much more relaxed and confident than the sweaty and glum Nixon (3).

September 26, 1969:  The Beatles release their last studio album, Abbey Road.

Sources:

1-Matthews, Dylan. “36 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war.”  Vox 26 Sept. 2019.

2-By Sewell Chan, Sewell.  “Soviet Officer Who Helped Avert Nuclear War, Is Dead at 77”  The New York Times 18 Sept. 2017.

3-Safire, William.  Lend Me Your Ears:  Great Speeches in History.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.