Thank you, Lt. Col Petrov.
Today is Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov Saves The World Day, one of my personal holidays.
On this day in 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, duty officer at a Soviet nuclear early warning outpost, correctly identified an indication of American missiles incoming as a glitch, thereby preventing a nuclear exchange.
Petrov died in 2017, but as somebody who grew up in the dying days of the first cold war, I still feel an immense debt of gratitude to him for, you know, being alive.
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