• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    Politicians and kings rarely do something they weren’t forced to, and inventors are rarely without competition, so I take issue with most of the responses here.

    Instead, I’ll go with naval officer Vasily Arkhipov, who, if he had decided to agree with the normal officers of the submarine he happened to be on, would have started a hot Cold War on 27 October, 1962.

    Then again, there was a separate, slightly less severe close call the same day, so if you butterfly that who knows what else happens. It was a crazy time where few understood nuclear diplomacy and cold warfare, but nukes were ubiquitous, and were being treated like normal weapons. We got lucky.