On the brink, yet again

As the story is told in part five of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, Netflix's epic nine-part history of the Cold War and its weapons, the world was on edge in September 1983.

- Russell Brown

The month began with the Soviet military shooting down a Korean Air passenger flight that had wandered off its course. It concluded a whisker away from an accidental nuclear war that would have obliterated the life we knew.

The conventional wisdom and the story told in Turning Point is that the world is extremely fortunate that Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Army, was the duty officer at the command centre for the USSR's Oko nuclear early warning system on the night of September 26. Petrov, whose background was in engineering rather than a military careerist, decided that when the monitoring system in his care reported that five American nuclear missiles were on their way, it was likely malfunctioning. He did not, as a real military man would, follow orders and report the alarm to his superiors, who might have launched a retaliatory strike, such was their paranoia.