Five Blips to Armageddon: The Petrov Alarm

On September 26, 1983, Soviet radar detected five incoming U.S. missiles. The doomsday scenario had arrived—except it hadn't.

This episode of Unsettled: The Hidden Record reconstructs the moment the world nearly ended because of a satellite error. When the alert came through, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the officer on duty. All protocols pointed to retaliation. Instead, he disobeyed them—and stopped a nuclear war.

What the radar saw were phantom missiles. A rare atmospheric alignment had fooled a multibillion-dollar system. But had another officer been in that seat, civilization as we know it might have ended before sunrise.

Why was such a catastrophic system so fragile? Why did the USSR keep it secret? And what does it say about how close we’ve always been to the edge?

This is the story of one man, one screen, and five false blips that almost erased us.