# Has anyone ever literally saved the world? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 14, 2009, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950 "2009-07-14T05:03:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2009, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/41 "2009-07-16T01:35:56Z")
> [@Philster](#): > > Get over yourself. You assume way too much. Team Kennedy flat-out stopped the destruction of billions of people? Really? We assume the Soviet Union wanted to provoke us into MAD? > > This thread might have to wind up in Great Debates, and die there. > > Team Kennedy: good for them! I love when Dems balls up and act like Republicans. Doesn’t mean billions would have died without them. Your detailed, insightful, thoroughly accurate knowledge of the history of the cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis astounds me. I’ll just leave it at that for now; I’ve got a far more important case to prepare IRL, but in truth, the list of possible tasks or activities that are _less_ valuable than spending more of my time trying to educate you on these matters consists of… let me see. Oh, yeah: the null set… ---
**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2009, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/42 "2009-07-16T03:18:09Z")
> [@badger197](#): > > For an alternative view of McNamara’s role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see: [http://hnn.us/articles/97687.html](http://hnn.us/articles/97687.html) > > Based on tapes made in the Kennedy White House, this author asserts that: > > “Unfortunately, as Fred Kaplan has observed, ‘McNamara’s recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a self-serving travesty.’ McNamara told [filmmaker Errol] Morris that he was JFK’s principal ally in ‘trying to keep us out of war.’ In fact, after the first two days of ExComm meetings, McNamara ‘became an increasingly firm advocate of bombing the Soviet missile sites … and of then invading the island of Cuba itself—even if doing so risked sparking a larger war with the USSR.’” > > And, after an American U2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a surface to air missile, McNamara urged: “We oughta go in at dawn and take out that SAM site… And we oughta send a surveillance aircraft in tomorrow in the regular flights early in the morning, and we oughta be prepared to take out more SAM sites and knock out the… aircraft.” > > Perhaps, McNamara was not such a world-saver in this instance… > [@Sailboat](#): > > Your link is pretty solid documentation disproving McNamara’s heroism. I’d like to see **ambushed** respond to it. > > It leaves JFK looking like the only reasonable person – well, JFK and Khrushchev looking like the only reasonable people – in the whole affair. Very well, I shall tender my response that I’ve developed thus far into my research: “Alternative view” is quite the most apt choice of phrase for the thesis you both cite. The difference between “alternative view” and “alternative history” in this specific instance might well be too subtle for my meager intellect to recognize, and for that, I can only offer my apologies. But heck, “alternative history” represents a valid science fiction sub-genre, and I’d be a fool to deny its popularity… I’ve spent a few hours on and off researching this alternative tonight, and what has struck me thus far is the most amazingly improbable coincidence: Each and every time so far that I’ve found an article, quotation, footnote or other reference to the allegation that McNamara became a sincere advocate – firm or otherwise – for bombing the Soviet missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis, _ **every single time** _ the trail eventually leads back to one or both of the following names: Fred Kaplan and/or Sheldon Stern. I’d imagine there have been thousands of academic researchers investigating what is almost universally considered to be the two weeks during which humanity came by far the closest to starting an all-out, nuclear MAD and terminal World War III and the extinction of an unknowable number of species (unknowable in part because no one has any reliable estimate of just how many species are alive today). But so far, I have not found even one credible academic source who alleges what Kaplan and Stern has regarding McNamara. Curious coincidence, no? I have so far not found _one_ other original source for these claims. What are the odds? It’s true I haven’t been able to dedicate all \*that \*much time to researching this assertion regarding McNamara’s alleged change of heart, an allegation that I have not yet found in the scholarship of others (in fact, what I’ve found so far from every other source – discounting McNamara himself, of course, for we much provisionally assume that he lied or misremembered the events of so long ago if we are to remain intellectually honest – reports just the opposite. So far, all Web roads lead inevitably to Kaplan and/or Stern as the final stop. There had been an active debate – which might possibly be ongoing or might start up again at some later date when more data becomes available – regarding whether the audio tapes recorded at various events during the crisis were correctly transcribed or not. But the original source recordings are – as one might expect of technologically ancient recorders and microphones and, worse still, corrupt, incomplete, time-, chemically- and environmentally-degraded, incorrectly biased analog magnetic tapes, as well as mike positioning, room acoustics, ambient noise level, how clear and loud all the meeting participants were speaking from moment to moment – _most emphatically_ debatable and probably impossible to resolve with sufficient certainty. Such efforts are made vastly more difficult by psycho-acoustics, human nature, confirmation bias, and the strong tendency for others to “decipher” ambiguous sounds to words the same way again and again once they hear what they prefer to hear and/or are psychologically led by those considered, rightly or wrongly, to be experts at “correctly” interpreting ambiguous sounds, such as the “concerned” Christian parents who play their kids’ music backwards to determine precisely what lies Satan is telling them and how many babies they’re supposed to eat alive on Satanic holidays. I’ll report back as soon as I download all the tapes and produce time-reversed backwards digital audio files and listen to them carefully. The wonderful commercial audio editor GoldWave provides a single button to reverse the digital input files, so it shouldn’t take more than a few months… (Sorry, I forgot to take my Sarcasmo pills today, recommended by 9 out of 10 doctors, psychotherapists, and annoyed message board readers everywhere…) ---
**Author:** ![rbroome](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/838e76/32.png) [@rbroome](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rbroome)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2009, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/43 "2009-07-16T12:15:05Z")
> [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Bit of an overstatement there. I was only a kid when all of this happened, but we were scared. We were fully aware of what was up. My school ran a special drill in which every child walked home from school and recorded the time it took them to reach home. We did the duck and cover drill, and my family had a meeting about what we were all supposed to do if the situation came to war. > > We may not have known exactly how close it was, but an awful lot of people had brownies in their shorts. agreed. it was a scary time. CD distributed emergency supplies to our house outside DC. I remember Dad getting the briefing. (mostly plastic bottles to hold water. Given how close we were to DC, it wasn’t going to be much use). But back then, everyone I have ever read about assumed that Moscow was the decisionmaker. That war would have started if Khrushchev had ordered it-and not start if he didn’t. They assumed Russia had the same command structure the US did. When the conference on the Cuban missile crisis convened in the 90’s there were a lot of surprised westerners. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/44 "2011-05-31T18:59:57Z")
> [@ambushed](#): > > Nah, I don’t think that would cut it. No specific, irreplaceable individual(s) were necessary for humanity to discover, invent or implement that or any number of billions of other ideas, knowledge, solutions, technology, etc. No matter what, all that and most everything else would have been accomplished before too long by some person or group. Often, the time just becomes ripe for a vital discovery. Consider relativity or evolution by natural selection, for example: both Einstein and Darwin were very nearly scooped (if not \*actually \*scooped, especially in the case of relativity). > > Whereas the Kennedy brothers and Khrushchev (and arguably also McNamara) were utterly and completely \*\*\*irreplaceable \*\*\*in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. And thereby saved the _ **world** _, not just humanity. You’re implicitly claiming that not one of the three billion people in the world – heck, that not one of the hundred billion or so people who have ever lived – would have managed to succeed if placed in those positions instead of the Kennedys, Khrushchev, and McNamara. Some scientists would have been competent enough to make the discovery once the available evidence surfaced, some would not. Some politicians would have been competent enough to avoid war once a crisis arose, some would not. Either specific individuals deserve the credit for what they did in the given situation, or not, equally in both cases. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/45 "2011-05-31T19:06:30Z")
> [@Philster](#): > > Whoever had a hand in ensuring that nitrogen could be fixed from the air and made available to the soil as a fertilizer, ensuring food for the billions of people on the planet. Without this process, soils would be nitrogen depleted and billions would starve to death. > [@WarmNPrickly](#): > > I wonder if this can really be called lives saved though, since had the Haber Bosch process never been developed, many people simply would not have been born. Right. Also, Haber-Bosch may turn out to have enabled an unsustainable global population boom which will result in more lives lost, and more total suffering, than if we’d had to stick with crop rotation and composting and other time-honored methods for soil replenishment. ---
**Author:** ![Henrichek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@Henrichek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Henrichek)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/46 "2011-05-31T21:10:48Z")
**ambushed** , does it really matter that the agreement with Turkey was made in 1959? At least according to Wikipedia the missiles were installed in April 1962, which would put it squarely on Kennedy’s watch, and I assume he could have revoked the decision to place the missiles and avoid triggering the whole crisis as he ended up doing. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/47 "2011-05-31T21:13:23Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > You’re implicitly claiming that not one of the three billion people in the world – heck, that not one of the hundred billion or so people who have ever lived – would have managed to succeed if placed in those positions instead of the Kennedys, Khrushchev, and McNamara. > > Some scientists would have been competent enough to make the discovery once the available evidence surfaced, some would not. Some politicians would have been competent enough to avoid war once a crisis arose, some would not. Either specific individuals deserve the credit for what they did in the given situation, or not, equally in both cases. I think he’s saying that if the inventor of nitrogen fixation had dropped the ball and not made this discovery, someone else would have in the next decades or so, long before we starved ourselves into oblivion. On the other hand there was only one chance to get the Cuban crisis right. If Kennedy, Khrushchev et al. dropped the ball, that’s it game over. Others could have filled their shoes and done as well, but if Kennedy et al. failed others wouldn’t get a chance to try. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/48 "2011-05-31T21:20:54Z")
The person who invented the combustion engine (James Watt?) certainly benefited many people and arguable made it possible to have a world that is by enlarge devoid of legal slavery. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/49 "2011-05-31T21:26:52Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > The person who invented the combustion engine (James Watt?) certainly benefited many people and arguable made it possible to have a world that is by enlarge devoid of legal slavery. The phrase is “by and large.” Dex had a [staff column on the origin of the phrase](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1908/what-is-the-origin-of-by-and-large). No biggie, but it took me a minute to figure it out. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2011, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/50 "2011-05-31T22:33:32Z")
> [@badger197](#): > > For an alternative view of McNamara’s role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, see: [http://hnn.us/articles/97687.html](http://hnn.us/articles/97687.html) > Based on tapes made in the Kennedy White House, this author asserts that: > > "Unfortunately, as Fred Kaplan has observed, ‘McNamara’s recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a self-serving travesty.’ McNamara told [filmmaker Errol] Morris that he was JFK’s principal ally in ‘trying to keep us out of war.’ This is a curious interpretation of McNamara’s words, because McNamara himself credits Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson with persuading John Kennedy to respond to the former “soft” message and ignore the “hard-line” message, while McNamara and other advisers were discussing what kind of pre-emptive attack should be made upon Cuba. Far from being a “self-serving travesty,” McNamara freely admits that they neither understood the situation on the ground in Cuba (i.e. that nuclear weapons were deployed and that Fidel Castro recommended using them in the case of a US attack) nor appreciated the situation that Khrushchev was in. Thompson’s plea to consider Khrushchev’s stance (which Morris parsed as “Empathize with your enemy,” in his list of lessons learned) and presents it as a situation where the group of professional advisors, including and especially himself, failed to provide informed advice to the President. Fred Kaplan himself has made a minor career out of attempting to vilify McNamara, often with little more than ad hominem and taking statements out of context. In any case, responsibility for averting the potential devastating (but hardly world-ending, given the then limited extent of missile technology) Cuban Missile Crisis belongs with Thompson and Khrushchev, the latter of whom fell upon his sword to aver from the position demanded by military hardliners, which likely resulted in the eventual bloodless coup that removed him from office. Some credit should be advanced to Oleg Penkovsky as well, who informed British and American intelligence about the movement of nuclear weapons to Cuba (although it can be argued that his actions and the response to them inflamed tensions). However, the potential impact of this pales in comparison to that of the aforementioned Petrov incident. However, as it usually happens, many of the true heroes of the Cold War go virtually without mention. This is certainly true of Vitely Mette, a former Soviet Navy officer who informed the United States about a large stockpike of highly enriched uranium (HEU). At an enrichment level of \>90% [sup]235[/sup]U, this could have easily made fictional stories about terrorist organizations or groups of nuclear experts building compact nuclear weapons practicable. Mette helped confirm the veracity of the material and coordinate the removal via Project Sapphire to the United States for conversion into fuel elements. Had a nation such as Iran, Pakistan, or North Korea obtained this material, it would not only have been able to construct sophisticated nuclear weapons but the isotope ratios would source it back to the former Soviet Union, potentially creating misinformed hostility at a time in which a number of intelligence pundits were still claiming that the “collapse” of the Soviet Union was a ruse to put NATO off balance. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![mrsmcfall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a698b9/32.png) [@mrsmcfall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mrsmcfall)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2011, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/51 "2011-06-01T02:19:16Z")
Jesus. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2011, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/52 "2011-06-01T02:23:19Z")
Nobody’s saving the world from zombies. ---
**Author:** ![johnpost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@johnpost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnpost)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2011, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/53 "2011-06-01T04:19:12Z")
> [@rbroome](#): > > Even more scary, the West had no idea how close we were to war for 30 years. > [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Bit of an overstatement there. I was only a kid when all of this happened, but we were scared. We were fully aware of what was up. My school ran a special drill in which every child walked home from school and recorded the time it took them to reach home. We did the duck and cover drill, and my family had a meeting about what we were all supposed to do if the situation came to war. > > We may not have known exactly how close it was, but an awful lot of people had brownies in their shorts. the tv news had some really worried newcasters, they showed real dread. it was the brink of war. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2011, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/54 "2011-06-01T21:58:47Z")
I’m going to go for an outlier and pick Nelson Mandela. After thirty years of imprisonment he came out and stopped a brutal civil war with the power of his ideas and his compassion. He also prevented a bloody campaign of revenge against the white Afrikaner minority by initiating what was the most extraordinary government campaign I’ve ever heard of – the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. White and black participants of the war were able to come forward and tell their stories, in large part without fear of punishment. I personally think the transfer of power in South Africa and the subsequent behavior of the black majority government to be the greatest miracle in my lifetime. I think it may have saved millions of lives, because IIRC, South Africa had nukes by then. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2011, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/55 "2011-06-01T23:28:26Z")
I doubt he is really a contender, but I keep discovering amazing things about [Joan Pujol Garcia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garcia), the WWII double agent and quite possibly the greatest bullshit artist that has ever lived. A Spaniard who hated fascists, he tried to volunteer as a spy for the British, was rejected, then invented a persona as a fascist and became a spy for the Germans, then became a double-agent for the Brits. He wound up becoming the spymaster for 27 completely fictional other agents (getting paid for all of them), with the money financing the British spy effort. He became so trusted by the Nazis that they believed his story that Normandy was a diversion while the real invasion was going to happen at Calis. After the war, he received an MBE from the British Crown, and _also_ the Iron Cross from the Germans. The most recent thing I’ve learned was that his reports to the Germans were then encrypted with the Enigma machine and transmitted, providing the known plaintext vital to cracking other messages. I couldn’t say for sure exactly how many lives he saved by shortening WWII. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2011, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/56 "2011-06-02T01:31:06Z")
> [@gaffa](#): > > … > The most recent thing I’ve learned was that his reports to the Germans were then encrypted with the Enigma machine and transmitted, providing the known plaintext vital to cracking other messages… This can’t be true. Accirding to [this bio](http://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/articles/a-master-of-disguise), he didn’t start working for the British until 1942. They were reading Enigma will before that. Also, the Germans thought he was in England. I just can’t believe the Germans would give their most secret coding machine to an agent residing in London. Do you have a cite for this? ---
**Author:** ![Autolycus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/22d042/32.png) [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2011, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/57 "2011-06-02T02:01:19Z")
Who was the guy who revolutionized the world’s food supply? The Green Revolution or something like that. In sheer lives saved, I’m going with that guy. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2011, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/58 "2011-06-02T03:12:05Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Also, the Germans thought he was in England. I just can’t believe the Germans would give their most secret coding machine to an agent residing in London. I didn’t say they gave him a machine. He passed information to his German handler, who transmitted Enigma-encoded messages, which were intercepted. > [@](#): > > Do you have a cite for this? The BBC documentary _[The Man Who Fooled the Nazis](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yvsd8)_ ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2011, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/59 "2011-06-02T03:22:14Z")
Harry Truman and George Marshall. ---
**Author:** ![user\_hostile](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/user_hostile/32/474_2.png) [@user\_hostile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/user_hostile)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2011, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950/60 "2011-06-02T05:56:38Z")
> [@ambushed](#): > > Unless, of course, you can prove that Kennedy traveled backwards in time? Son, I suggest you watch Oliver Stone’s _JFK_. After watching that, _anything_ is possible! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-anyone-ever-literally-saved-the-world/502950.md?page=4)