By refusing to agree to the firing of a nuclear torpedo at a US warship, Vasily Arkhipov averts nuclear war.

Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov was a senior Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Soviet submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo against ships of the United States Navy at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The course of events that would have followed such an action cannot be known, but speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war.