Recently, I read that it must only be appropriate that a man that had avoided the limelight for so long died four months before his death even reached the international press. That man was Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, and he is the man responsible for the existence of anyone reading this article.

Petrov never thought much of his noble act, saying that what he had done would have been done by anybody. Would it have? Nobody can say for certain, but when your warning systems are saying your enemy’s bombs are coming for you, you would reckon that launching your own bombs would be a rational response. Had someone like that, and not Stanislav Petrov, been in charge of the Soviet missile system that fateful day in 1983, the world would have burned.

On September 26, 1983, the Soviet early warning system, tasked with detecting nuclear weapons inbound from a hostile power (most likely the United States), detected five missiles heading towards the Soviet Union. Petrov was in charge of monitoring the system at a base near Moscow and was the first to see these ‘missiles.’

In fact, they were caused by an uncommon cloud pattern over North Dakota. Petrov understood that any first strike by the United States would be all-out with no room left for the Soviet Union to retaliate with its own weapons. Therefore, Petrov concluded, these missiles were operator errors.

Petrov did not sound the alarm, and therefore, no Soviet missiles were fired. Had somebody without his know-how been at the bunker near Serpukhov, human civilization would be reduced to radioactive ash. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, would have been killed in the Soviet strike and American counterstrike, and the remainder would have soon starved as world commerce, communications, and infrastructure ground to a halt.

At that time in 1983, my mother was living in Washington, D.C. and my father was living in Madison, Wisconsin, both in their first months of college. Washington would have been obliterated without question, and even if Madison were not hit, it would have been overwhelmed by those fleeing from Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis. I owe my very existence to this man who prevented armageddon, and so do all seven some billion of us.

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov may now rest. He deserves that peace, for he ensured life for billions of people. Would others have done the same in his position? Perhaps. We cannot know for certain, for we cannot replay history with his removal. However, it stands that you and I exist due to this man’s one single right decision, and for that he deserves to be remembered as a savior of all humanity.