Trailer: The True Story of “The Man Who Saved the World”

Many feature films have imagined what would happen if a real or apparent nuclear attack precipitated war. None of them came close to the real-life story told in this documentary from Kevin Costner about Stanislav Petrov, the Russian Lt. Colonel, who sacrificed everything by disobeying the chain of nuclear launch commands and saving millions of American lives. On September 26, 1983 he was the commanding officer on duty at the Soviet nuclear early warning center, when the system falsely reported the launching of five nuclear missiles from the United States. In the harrowing moments that followed, Petrov overruled the system’s warning, personally declaring that it was a false alarm. This monumental decision prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its Western allies.