Today is Stanislav Petrov day | Hacker News Reader

Today is Stanislav Petrov day

en.wikipedia.org

68 pointsmaxbond13 comments

Hello HN,

42 years ago today, lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov chose not to launch missiles against the United States while on duty in the Serpukhov-15 missile bunker after receiving what he correctly judged to be a false alarm in a early warning system.

This hasn't been formalized into a holiday so you'll find different advice online about how to celebrate, but I intend to raise a toast to Petrov and to watch the movie WarGames released the same year.

Cheers to Mr. Petrov and to everyone alive that he saved.

What a real hero! Is it known why he suspected it wasn’t real?

Edit: I see it here.

>In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five missiles seemed an illogical start.[11] In addition, the launch detection system was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had failed to pick up corroborative evidence even after several minutes of the false alarm.

Is there a technical write up of the false positive? I've long known about Petrov and his intuition, but eventually the error was confirmed and I haven't been able to find much detail as to the "how". Presumably the satellite system that failed had a lab twin, and the failure was reproduced there?

From wikipedia:

"It was subsequently determined that the false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite."

The reality is more complicated. I put a comment a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45367307

I'm not really sure how your comment would disprove the story. It seems that it's unclear if the Dead Hand was even active at this time, and also it probably triggers when impact occurs rather than on satellite detection.

Meanwhile this case was a false satellite detection which, if reported, may have caused a retaliatory launch of nukes.

I don't think you understand the content you linked. An automatic retaliation systems is not there to "prevent hasty decisions". It is there to make automatic hasty decisions based on input from sensors.

OMG the dis-information in your IM. Anyone else - please read the article and form your own opinions.

You: > [...] USSR used a system called dead hand [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand to detect a nuclear attack and to retaliate. [...] USSR required a nuclear retaliatory system that could prevent hasty decisions. Hence Dead Hand system.

Wikipedia article you linked: "Dead Hand [...] is a Cold War–era automatic or semi-automatic nuclear weapons control system [...] that was constructed by the Soviet Union. The system remains in use in the post-Soviet Russian Federation. An example of fail-deadly and mutual assured destruction deterrence, it can initiate the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by sending a pre-entered highest-authority order from the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Strategic Missile Force Management to command posts and individual silos if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity, and pressure sensors even with the commanding elements fully destroyed."

I have no idea how you got from "automated nuclear weapons launch system" to "prevents hasty decisions". Seems like the opposite to me: an incredibly irresponsible system that has more of a chance of responding to a false positive than, demonstrably, human operators.

It is not a secret that the United States passed to the Soviets technology for PAL (permissive activation links). (Purportedly in Vienna.)

One might hope that the US has also passed the USSR/Russia technology that would make Perimeter more robust and logically airtight.

I know the story and it's really impressive, but how do we know that it is true?

Many of us had the opportunity, at least in principle, to travel to his abode and personally thank him and bear a gift or two. I for one regret that I did not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com