30 years ago, the Cold War was raging on. If you don’t know what that is, it was the period from 1947 to 1991 where both the U.S and Russia had large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on each other. The only thing that stopped them from doing so was the knowledge that the other side would have time to react. The U.S and Russia both had surveillance systems to know of the other country had a nuke in the air headed for them.

On this day, September 26, in 1983, a man named Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the Russian surveillance room when the computer notified him that satellites had detected five nuclear missile launches from the U.S. He was told to pass this information on to his superiors, who would then launch a counter-strike.

He refused to notify anyone of the incident, suspecting it was just an error in the computer system.

No nukes ever hit Russian soil. Later, it was found that the ‘nukes’ were just light bouncing off of clouds which confused the satellite. Petrov was right, and likely saved all of humanity by stopping the outbreak of nuclear war. However, almost no one has heard of him.

We celebrate men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who win wars. These were great men, but the greater men, the men like Petrov who stopped these wars from ever happening - no one has heard of these men.

Let it be known, that September 26 is Petrov Day, in honor of the acts of a great man who saved the world, and of who almost no one has heard the name of.

My 11-year-old son wrote and then read this speech to his six grade class.