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Meet the crotchety, bitter old man who, back in 1983 as a crotchety, bitter younger man, refused to initiate global nuclear war. A true story! I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

If you’re alive and not spending your days wandering a blasted radioactive afterscape in search of food — and I’m pretty sure we’re all doing that this weekend only for fun with Mad Max — then you have former Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov to thank. No, I had never heard of him, either, which is a disgrace that The Man Who Saved the World attempts to remedy.

On September 26, 1983, Petrov was on duty at a Soviet military installation outside Moscow that watched the skies for incoming American nuclear missiles when alarms started blaring. They were false alarms, of course, but Petrov didn’t know that,...

The extraordinary true story of the Russian colonel who decided not to launch a retaliatory strike when it appeared that Us missiles were on their way

This Danish-made film – half documentary, half reconstruction – tells the extraordinary story of Stanislav Petrov, once a colonel in the Soviet army who averted the third world war in 1983. As commanding officer at a nuclear weapons station, it was his decision whether or not to launch a retaliatory strike when Russian computers erroneously detected incoming American missiles, but he trusted his gut and didn’t give the command. As Russian actors play out the events and the tragic story of what happened next to Petrov, the film-makers follow the real Petrov, now a crotchety alcoholic haunted by the past, as he visits the Us with his young translator in tow. Sergey Shnyryov is superb as Petrov’s fictional counterpart, and the present and the past...