Happy Stanislav Petrov day! Petrov was responsible for overseeing an early warning system and judging whether a retaliatory nuclear strike should be launched in the event of an attack against the Soviet Union. The system indicated an attack was inbound. He judged it to be a false alarm, and disobeyed his orders. There's a lot more to the story, but the part I find most interesting is how it was suppressed. To quote the wiki article: According to Petrov, he received no reward because the incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the scientists who were responsible for it, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had to be punished.