And you've never heard of him.

You, have, no doubt, heard of and probably lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when, it's said, the world came the closest it's been to a global nuclear war. What you almost certainly aren't aware of is just how close that was – and it had nothing to do directly with those missiles.

What has subsequently been disclosed in 2002 is that during that crisis a US aircraft carrier and several of its destroyers located a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean. The sub was conventially powered but carried a nuclear torpedo.

To bring the sub to the surface the navy threw depth charges at it. These were “blanks” but the sub could not know that. Running out of air, the submarine Captain took the decision to surface, whereupon for unaccountable reasons, they were subjected to machine gun fire from the carrier's aircraft. In retaliation the sub turned its torpedo towards the carrier.

The decision to fire reposed in the hands of three senior officers – the Captain, the Political Officer and the on-board Navy Commander (US equivalent rank) but required the agreement of all three (possibly a three-key process, I'm guesssing).

The Captain and Political Officer were for firing, no doubt believing that world war had already started while they'd been in deep incommunicado, while the Commander was not.

Deploying a nuclear weapon against a US aircraft carrier at this time of incomparable political and military tension would have undoubtedly precipitated a nuclear war in which the best estimates are that 1/3 of the world's population would have perished, most disproportionately in the US, the USSR, China and Europe.

You almost certainly owe your existence today to a man you have never heard of – Vasily Arkhipov.

“The Man Who Saved the World”.