Do you know about this man? You should.



His name is Stanislav Petrov, and as Tim Blair says, if you're alive, you probably owe it to him.

Petrov was the watch officer of the Soviet early-warning system one night in 1983 when their spy satellites and computer systems flashed that five American Minuteman missiles were launched and en route to the Soviet Union.

[H]is instructions, if he detected missiles targeting the Soviet Union, were to push the button and launch a counter-offensive.

He didn’t. Minutes later, no missiles came; months later, the frightening data across his monitor was determined to have been a system glitch. Today, the Association of World Citizens is calling him “the forgotten hero of our time,” a title befitting the man whose responsibility had been to start World War III.