Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces whose prudence helped avert a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. He was the on-duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system in Serpukhov-15 on September 26, 1983, when the alarms of the detection system went off. However, he trusted his civilian training, as opposed to his colleagues’ pure military training of following instructions, and determined that it must be a false alarm considering the system was installed in a rushed manner as a response to similar systems in the US and the fact that there were only five missiles, while he believed if America were to launch a nuclear attack, there will be significantly more missiles. He reported system malfunction and it was later determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds above North Dakota and the Molniya orbits of the satellites. As his positive report could have resulted in a retaliatory Russian nuclear attack on the US and causing a nuclear war, he has been credited as having "saved the world". He received numerous international awards, even though he was not felicitated by the Russian government to avoid punishing his superiors and the scientists responsible for the error.