Superhero movies are fun to watch, but is there actually some truth to them? These are people who actually saved the world.
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Vasili Arkhipov. On 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was on board the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba when the US forces began dropping non-lethal depth charges. While the action was designed to encourage the Soviet submarines to surface, the crew of B-59 had been incommunicado and so were unaware of the intention. They thought they were witnessing the beginning of a third world war.
Trapped in the sweltering submarine – the air-conditioning was no longer working – the crew feared death. But, unknown to the US forces, they had a special weapon in their arsenal: a ten kilotonne nuclear torpedo. What’s more, the officers had permission to launch it without waiting for approval from Moscow.
But there was an important caveat: all three senior officers on board had to agree to deploy the weapon. As a result, the situation in the control room played out very differently. Arkhipov refused to sanction the launch of the weapon and calmed the captain down. The torpedo was never fired.
Had it been launched, the fate of the world would have been very different: the attack would probably have started a nuclear war which would have caused global devastation, with unimaginable numbers of civilian deaths.
I think there was another rather similar situation involving nukes some time later, but I don't remember the details. It involved some soviet satellites interpreting atmospheric lightning effects or something like that as nuke launches and the only thing, or rather the only one, preventing the start of a nuclear war was some soviet officer reasoning "wait, that makes no sense" and deciding NOT to launch the "counter attack".
