Stanislav Petrov arguably saved the world on September 26th, 1983. He was a colonel in the USSR. Radar showed that the US had launched a single nuclear warhead at Russia. Protocol was that he should have fired his nuclear warheads in retaliation but he could not understand why the US would only fire one missle so he assumed it was a radar malfunction and disobeyed protocol. Had he not we may well have had nuclear war.

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