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.
Boris Shpitalniy Boris Shpitalniy graduated from MAMI Moscow State Technical University in 1927. Three years later, Boris Shpitalniy together with Irinarkh Komaritsky designed the ShKAS machine gun, a 7.62 mm machine gun widely used by Soviet aircraft in the 1930s and during World War II. In 1939, a small number of Ultra-ShKAS were produced featuring a firing rate of 3,000 rounds per minute, but these saw only limited use due to reliability problems. ShKAS served as the basis for the ShVAK cannon in 1936 (designed in collaboration with Semyon Vladimirov). This 20-mm autocannon was installed in many Soviet aircraft including Yakovlev Yak-1, Polikarpov I-153 and I-16, Lavochkin La-5 and La-7, LaGG-3, early Ilyushin Il-2, and Soviet-modified Hawker Hurricane aircraft, as well as T-38 and T-60 tanks. His 37 mm autocannon, the Sh-37, was less successful though, and saw only brief service between 1941 and 1942.