What lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces correctly identified a false alarm on 26 September 1983
1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple USAF Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States. These missile attack warnings were correctly identified as a false alarm by Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack based on erroneous data on the United States and its NATO allies, which would have probably resulted in immediate escalation of the cold-war stalemate to a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had malfunctioned.
Vladimir Danchev Vladimir Danchev was a newscaster at Soviet radio in Moscow, who is famous for calling on the Afghan people to resist the Soviet invasion of their country on 23 May 1983. His controversial encouragement of armed resistance against the Russian military outraged many of his countrymen. However, according to the American political analyst Noam Chomsky and other commentators, his principal transgression was that he embarrassed the Soviet government by contradicting their official ideology, by describing the presence of Soviet forces in Afghanistan as an “invasion.” According to the party line, Russia was not invading Afghanistan; it was defending the Afghan people against terrorists who were funded by foreign sources (the USSR was referring to the Mujahedin and the CIA). Danchev was subsequently sent to a psychiatric hospital and returned to work in December 1983. He was praised in the U.S. media as a hero of free speech and free thought. Danchev was of Russian and Bulgarian descent and grew up in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR.