A pair of US Air Force C-130 cargo planes landed at Russia's Vnukovo International Airport on Saturday, followed by a charter flight from California. The cargo planes carried $4.5 million in emergency aid to help avert what could become a monumental disaster, far greater than our Gulf oil spill where it has been reported we turned away about 15 nations that wanted to help us.

The Vnukovo airport, which is about 17 miles from Moscow, has problems. The airport is currently hampered by a toxic smog caused by the 460 raging wildfires in Russia and the worst heat wave in the USSR's history. One-fourth of the crops are ruined, but the U.S. help, hastily arranged between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russia President Dmitry Medvedev, is for a very different purpose.

Russia's top-secret nuclear research center - located in the "closed city" of Sarov - is now in serious danger from the savage wildfires. If it were to burn, the results would be catastrophic. Sarov, which you can't find on many maps because heavy military patrols allow no foreigners or visitors, is somewhere in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast region, if that helps.

"We will always remember this gesture, this arm that was extended to us at a very difficult time," the deputy head of the Russian emergencies ministry, Valery Shuikov, said at the airport Saturday, and he revealed two more C-130s and another charter, reportedly carrying seasoned California wildfire experts, would arrive "in a few days."

Shuikov even said, "We acknowledge and assess positively the approach of the American side. Such steps fully correspond to the spirit of partner-like constructive relations between our countries."

Well, let me tell you something. I'm old enough to remember when it was a little different, like that September night back in 1983 when the "closed town" was ominously called Arzamas-16 instead of Sarov.

This was at the height of the Cold War and Larry McDonald, a U.S. Congressman from Georgia who loathed communism, had just been killed - or murdered - three weeks before. Tensions between the superpowers were tighter than a banjo string and I know a guy who actually flew nuclear warheads to both Alaska and the North Pole.

McDonald, a doctor by trade but who was by then being touted by some to become the next President of the United States, was on his way to South Korea to celebrate the Mutual Defense Treaty. He even missed a couple of earlier flights before he boarded Korean Air Lines Flight 007. But under the most mysterious circumstances the defiant Russians knew he was in seat 02B, and claimed the plane, with 269 passengers and crew aboard, violated Russian air space.

The defenseless airliner was shot down by MIG fighters on Sept. 1, but had it not been for another incident 25 days later, you might not even be reading this story right now. Some believe what happened just before midnight on Sept. 26 actually occurred in Sarov, or Arzamas-16, but all that is known for sure is that horrifying alarms suddenly shrilled in an extremely secret bunker known as Serpukhov-15.

Many years later, when certain records were declassified in 1998, it was confirmed that on Sept. 26, 1983, a Russian colonel named Stanislav Petrov was in the command chair in that same secret bunker when the whole interior of the operations room went to bright red lights, the klaxon horns sounded, and the computer screens showed five nuclear missiles had been launched towards Russia from the United States.

Petrov froze, despite a flashing red button by his hand that carried the Russian word for "start." Other officers screamed, "Do your job!" but the colonel still stalled. He was a scientist by trade and while he could see clearly that the satellites indicated first one missile, and then four more Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles were in the air, he looked at the radar devices and they showed nothing.

True, a satellite will detect a missile before radar will and, yes, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader at the time, was nearly paranoid over an impending retaliatory attack, but Petrov, with his analytical mind, sensed it was a false alarm and hushed his doubters. "I had a funny feeling in my gut," he would later say.

First, he reasoned, if the U.S. attacked they would send a lot more hell than just five missiles. Had he hit his red button, Russian would have retaliated with enough might to cause a catastrophic nuclear holocaust. Why would the U.S. only launch five? Secondly, the Russian satellite detection system was new and, third, the computer data was also "raw" at the time.

So he did nothing - he stayed still - and, as the agonizing minutes ticked by in that chaotic bunker, it was soon determined he was indeed "the man who saved the world," that the missile computer images were actually the sun's reflections on high-altitude clouds. As Petrov and his badly-shaken officers watched, the "missiles" did not advance. Instead they merely disappeared, one by one, off the very frightening screens.

Several years ago there was a documentary about the now-deceased Petrov called "The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World." He also wrote a book that didn't cause much of a ripple, but as our Air Force C-130s carry fire-fighting gear to Russia this weekend, I hope for his sake we can help save the top-secret nuclear research facility simply because of what Stanislav Petrov did on Sept. 26, 1983.

He did nothing. And it meant everything.

royexum@aol.com