3 Seconds from World War 3

Stanislav Petrov

September 1, 1983. Soviet airspace over the Sakhalin Island. A Korean Boeing 747, flying from the US to South Korea, doesn't respond after violating Soviet airspace a second time. After escorting the 747 for more than an hour, two Soviet SU-15 interceptor aircraft receive the order to shoot down the airplane. 269 passengers and crew are killed.

The Cold War is on its hottest ever. The US military superiority feeds the belief of the Kremlin that a First Strike scenario by the United States is only a question of 'when'. What happens 4 weeks later should be viewed in that context.

On the night of September 26, lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov resumed his shift in a bunker of the Strategic Rocket Forces. The unimaginable happens when a Soviet УС-К Satellite from the Missile Early Warning System detects the launch of a U.S. ICBM and the computers report the incoming missile. According to Soviet strategy protocol, an immediate full-blown nuclear weapons counterattack against the US should be launched.

Colonel Petrov cannot believe that World War 3 has begun. Why only one missile? He's convinced it's a computer error and decides not  to confirm the missile launch to higher command, which might start a nuclear counterstrike. However, only minutes later, a second, a third and a fourth missile are detected. The USSR is under missile attack! Millions of people will be killed in Moscow. Now is the time to push the button.

Petrov refuses to believe it has come this far and stays convinced that the detected launches are a malfunctioning satellite or computer error. Despite the operators confirm that the missile detection system works properly, he confirms to higher command that the alert is a fals alarm.

 

Petrov was right and prevented a worldwide nuclear war that would have destroyed all large cities in both the US and the Soviet Union. This makes him one of the most important persons in the 20th century. As it later turned out, the false alarm was triggered by the sun that scattered on high altitude clouds.

Stanislav Petrov 2014

Unfortunately, the Kremlin wasn't that happy. By breaking a critical military protocol, Petrov risked millions of Soviet lives. He was sent into early retirement with a small pension and suffered a nervous breakdown. It was only in 1998 that a book, written by another officer in that bunker, revealed the story of this heroic man.
 

In 2006, Stanislav Petrov was honored by the United Nations in New York and received the World Citizen Award. Some of his trip to the United States was filmed and later used in the 2014 documentary movie The Man Who Saved the World that featured Stanislav Petrov himself and his translator Galina Kalinina. Stanislav Petrov passed away in Fryazino near Moscow in 2017, aged 77.

More about Petrov in this BBC news article with video, on WashingtonPost.com and the Brightstarsound tribute page.

There's more related info on this blog. The Soviet Око program with the УС-К  and УС-КС satellites in Russia’s Modern Early Warning Systems. This was not the first or worst nuclear incident, as you can read in 1983 - The Brink of Apocalypse, but it sure could have ended as the worst ever incident in history of human civilisation. Meanwhile, US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR. seriously miscalculated the Soviet nuclear intentions, fueling the race for nukes.

 

The Man Who Saved The World

FAPSI - Russia's SIGINT Agency

The Russian FAPSI (Federalnoye Agentsvo Pravitelstvennoi Svayazi I Informatsii) was Russia's Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information. In short: the Russian equivalent to the American NSA or British GCHQ.

After the reforms in 1991, the KGB was divided into several different smaller agencies. One of them was FAPSI, created from the KGB's 8th Main Directorat (communication and cryptography), the 12 Directorat (eavesdropping) and the 16th Directorat (interception of communications and Signal Intelligence). FAPSI was responsible for SIGINT (Signal Intelligence), government communications, cryptography in all its aspects and information technology.

FAPSI operated a large satellite network (since the 1970's more than 130 satellites) for interception and communications and had a large number of SIGINT stations around the world. One of the largest was located in Lourdes, Cuba. An enormous interception facility at the doorstep of the US, in the footprint of several American satellites, and a transmitter site of numbers stations. Another large station was located in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.

If you think only the West has its Echelon SIGINT collection, you forgot FAPSI, with far more personnel than NSA and GCHQ together! Inside Russia, FAPSI monitored civil and government communications and was responsible for approving all cryptographic software (other crypto software is forbidden in Russia).

FAPSI incorporated the Military School of FAPSI (aka the world largest hackers school) and the Military School of Communications. FAPSI also employed graduates from the Academy of Cryptography of the FSB (not a school but a "scientific organisation", read codebreakers). FAPSI also provided secure communications to the Leaders of the Russian Federation and encrypted HF telephone communications for the government. All together an enormous service that controlled all communications security and gathers large quantities of information, home and abroad.

From 2003 to 2004, FAPSI was gradually dissolved and its various departments were integrated in departments of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and in the Service of Special Communications and Information (Spetssvyaz) from the Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation (FSO). The recourses and operations of FAPSI remained largly the same, but are now controlled by other agencies of the Russian Federation.

More about FAPSI on Agentura.ru, KGB Military School (archived page) and the Federation of American Scientists.

The "Kurier" Kurzsignal System

At the end of the Second World War the Kriegsmarine - the German Navy - experimented with a new system of radio transmissions to counter the threat of Allied HF Direction Finding.

The "Kurier" system, based on what now is called burst-encoding, reduced the transmission time of a Kurzsignal - a short signal message - to only 340 milliseconds! A magnetic pickup element on a rotating arm passed 85 pre-settable levers on a drum. The settings contained the message in a pulse variation of Morse.

Not only the tranmission time was reduced, but Kurier also introduced a new and complex system of frequency schedules and small frequency shift in the Kurier codebook. The system was to be used for Kurzsignal and Wetterkurzsignale, the short messages and weather reports.

Although the Kurier experiment was given top priority it never became fully operational on the U-boat fleet before the end of the war. If Kurier had been operational earlier in the war, this could have been devastating for the Allied naval forces in the Atlantic. Being unable to locate U-boats by HF-DF and not monitoring the Kurzsignal messages would have deprived the codebreakers in Bletchley Park from the essential cribs to break the Naval Enigma keys.

More about the Kurier system on Kurzignale on German U-boats, That page also contains several images of the Kurier Kurzignal book which describes the procedures for frequency schedules and how to compose a Wetterkurzsignal or short signal weather report.

Foundation for German Communication

The Foundation for German Communication and related Technology is a foundation that preserves the history of German technology, more in particular from before and during the Second World War.

It's a huge collection of original documents, plans and circuit diagrams about all sorts of technology, ranging from radio equipment, encryption devices, patents, measurements, radar and company history.

I was especially pleased to find detailed documents and images about the G-Schreiber T52d cipher machine, the Kurier system, which is a German type of burst encoder transmission system, and radio equipment from the Abwehr (German secret service). There's an extensive Handbooks section with a wealth of original documents. Don't forget to visit the Archive displays with lots of detailed images of all kinds of equipment.

The diversity on documents and artefacts is far too large to explain here.Visit the Foundation for German Communication website to discover it yourself !