This is a great true story about the Cuban Missile Crisis and about one Soviet fleet commander who single handedly prevent nuclear war.
This happened twice during the cold war. The other guy was Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 became "The man who saved the world by doing nothing". https://www.wired.com/2007/09/dayintech-0926-2/ TLDR: A Soviet computer system monitoring feeds from satellites looking for US ICBM launches gave a false positive. Instead of just robotically initiating a counterstrike, Petrov figured the computer system was playing up and waited... and nothing happened. Thus saving the world. If he'd launched a counterstrike, it would have caused a real nuclear war between the USSR and USA.
Stanislav Petrov's role in avoiding a nuclear war has been way overstated. 1) Petrov had no authority to authorize or even recommend the launch of Soviet nuclear weapons. 2) After the second (of five) Minuteman ICBM launched "detected" (falsely) from the United States, Petrov did inform his superiors of the launches detected and told them he was overriding the computer because in his opinion it wa4s a false alarm. 3) It was Petrov's superiors who agreed with his reasoning and decided to NOT send the warning further up the chain of command. 4) At that time, in 1983, the U.S.S.R. did NOT have a system for rapidly launching a nuclear attack such as the U.S. like the "nuclear football" that the U.S. president and vice president have. Thus even if Petrov had not overridden the computer or told his superiors he thought it was a false alarm, the situation would've resolved itself in a few minutes anyway (when Soviet radars did not detect incoming missiles) long before any kind of counterstrike by the Soviets would've been initiated.