The historical record is a bit ambiguous as to exactly what Col. Petrov did or didn’t do.
The concensus opinion seems to be that he decided that some early warning system indications of an incoming U.S. raid were false alarms. So he waited for further corraborating evidence from other radar systems before reporting the possible attack up the chain of command. Corraboration which never came because it was indeed a false alarm.
In that sense he may have exceeded whatever his guidance was (“report everything immediately”). Or maybe his role was designed to have exactly that purpose: corraborate & confirm, then notify high command when you have high confidence of an accurate understanding of the situation. We just don’t know.
Regardless of which scenario was true that day, they are very different things from ignoring a valid launch order. At his level there was apparently some legitimate, designed-in, scope for judgment. Which he duly exercised. Out at the sharp end where I lived, by design there is no such scope.
Another nuance: “Checking one’s judgment at the door” as I said above is somewhat conditional. If I have faith that our political & higher military system is sensible, deliberative, & risk-averse I can more readily accept on faith the orders from above. And if my role is to operate some decision-making process I can beleive that it/they are well-designed, well provisioned, and that the other people & systems I depend on are performing their roles reliably.
Conversely, if I believe my superiors are incompetent and risk-aggressive, or I beleive our organization is unreliable, or our decision processes are poor and haphazard or blind, or that the systems & people I rely upon are not reliable or trustworthy, well I’ve got a different situation on my hands. For me personally, that’s when I need to remove myself from the situation by not going into that line of work. For somebody embedded in that situation, they have a much more nuanced problem to solve than I ever faced.
The outcome that day was undoubtedly the right thing. We’ll never know what would have happened had Petrov passed the uncorraborated warnings up the chain. Maybe the higher-ups would have waited for further confirmation. Maybe their procedures *required *they wait for further confirmation while making preparations to launch. Maybe they’d have gotten cold feet & done nothing. Or they might have gone hard-over and launched immediately.
As a general matter, what is the moral value of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Which *may *in fact have been what he did. A complex question to be sure.
Ultimately it’s criminally stupid that humananity has wandered into this situation. I hope we can, over the next 50 or 100 years, develop the wisdom to climb back out. The more I see public life worldwide dominated by Dark Ages religion, xenophobia, and greed, the less optimistic I become.