My answer also relates to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here’s the people I nominate, in order:
(1): Robert McNamara: As Secretary of Defense, he was the individual who “was most responsible for solving the Cuban Missile Crisis”. He was the first to suggest a Naval blockade within Kennedy’s inner circle. Had he remained CEO or whatever for Ford, we very likely would **not **be here now.
I think it’s deeply offensive for all those who are thrilled by McNamara’s recent death because of his deep and powerful influence in vigorously pushing the Vietnam War, but if saving the world doesn’t count at least as a mitigating factor against those charges, what would?
(2): John and Bobby Kennedy: The President pushed McNamara’s blockade idea as opposed to any kind of invasion of Cuba or any other approach. After long and painful negotiating - without JFK being present – Bobby Kennedy finally got all the cabinet as well as the Joint Chiefs to agree to a blockade.
(3): Nikita Khrushchev: He, too, pushed back hard against the Soviet hardliners urging him in that “pleasant” old Soviet way of threatening to purge Khrushchev and make war in his place. However, Khrushchev’s contributions towards avoiding a nuclear war went much, much farther. The key was his personal (if odd) secret message to JFK of offering a compromise that would allow both nations to end the hostilities while saving face for both. (And how I’d love to read that letter! But I can’t find it.)
When soon after, a demand was sent to JFK from the hard liners and the Soviet military drastically hardening the terms of Khrushchev’s previous letter, the Kennedy inner circle – quite brilliantly – convinced the President to ignore the hardline letter and respond instead to Khrushchev’s letter – odd contents and all. This apparently returned Khrushchev to power, so he was *essential *in ending the Crisis.
If the above had not happened as it did, it’s very difficult to estimate how many humans and other animals and plants would have been destroyed by the full-scale WW III followed by probable mass extinction.
We know now as we look back at what might have happened, that any U.S. military strike, by air, see, or invading ground troops against Cuba, would have opened Pandora’s box and led inevitably to WW III. Why? Because we learned in the last few years that Cuba already had its own battlefield nuclear weapons and and fully ready to go had any military action be taken against them. Unlike the actual missiles the Cuban Missile Crisis was meant to alleviate, these battlefield nukes were fueled up and ready to go at a moment’s notice, and they were under direct Cuban control, which meant that the battlefield nukes could be fired at will without authorization from Castro, let alone Khrushchev!
There’s no question that this was the closest we ever came to WW III, and any deviation from what Kennedy and Khrushchev actually did would have spelled doom indeed!
I’d place Stanislav Petrov next down on the list…