Few people know of him and yet conceivably hundreds of millions of people are alive because of him. Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov is credited with preventing the start of World War III and the nuclear devastation of the Earth.
On September 26, 1983, when he was in charge of an early warning bunker outside of Moscow, the system reported the U.S. had launched a missile attack on Russia. Instead of alerting command headquarters, which may have set in motion a retaliatory nuclear exchange, Colonel Petrov retained his composure for an agonizing time as alarms blared, trusting his judgment that the warning was a false alarm.
Colonel Petrov was correct and his decision saved humanity from a nuclear catastrophe. We are all indebted to Stanislav Petrov, a Hero of our time and Citizen of the World. He died on 19 May 2017, aged 77.
