This is the advantage of everyone really, really not wanting a nuclear war. We assume its not really until the evidence it is is overwhelming. And maybe even then.
A friend of mine has (had? it was a while ago) an uncle who was one of the key turners in a midwest ICBM silo in the early 1970s. Having turned into a pacifist hippie (while still working for STRATCOM) he admitted during every psychiatric review he totally wasn’t going to turn that key, not now, not ever, even when staring down a Soviet first strike, because he was totally not going to be that guy that killed thirty million people.
And for reasons my buddy nor her uncle can fathom, they kept him at post.
From my own experience with hardware and real life in general, I imagine they probably had some equipment who they already knew was not working 100% and it was the only one to detect such missiles. I can’t imagine any other reason why they wouldn’t report it without risk of being labeled a traitor afterwards.
This is pretty close to Petrov's account of his reasoning, plus that the early warning system only showed four or five missiles inbound and he expected a hypothetical American first strike to be way bigger
Context: In 1983, the Soviet Union detected incoming missiles. Rather than relaying the information, the officer on duty decided not to take action, thereby preventing a nuclear war.
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