1983: Doomsday

1983: Doomsday postulated the alternative outcome of the Sept. 26, 1983, when Colonel Stanislav Petrov was alerted, in error, to a possible US missile strike against the Soviet Union.

In OTL, Colonel Petrov believed the information to be false and did not alert the Kremlin to the data he was receiving. Given Cold War tensions at the time, such information would likely have convinced the Soviets that the US had launched a first strike attempting to "cut off the head" and launched their forces, in the believe it was a "counter-strike", not a first-strike.

The resulting nuclear exchange would have been close to the forecasts of almost complete destruction and "nuclear winter" predicted by many scientists of the day, resulting in as much as two billion people killed initially, possibly another two billion in the subsequent environmental disaster.