So there's a documentary called
The Man who saved the world about a soviet air defense officer who noticed a false alarm from their early alert satellites and didn't pass it up the chain. According to post people who stop reading there, this man stopped nuclear war.
What the documentary leaves off is the said Air Defense officer was only the 1st line of detection. He was the indian call center guy who takes your call and makes sure you rebooted your computer before sending you to the call center full of guys who are permited to deviate from the troubleshooting script. If he had decided to forward the alert, it would have gone to his commander, then to but Kremlin high-command (ok, its been a minute, there might have been another level).
Assuming the alert was still looking valid, what the Kremlin would have done is picked up the hotline to the US and asked, essentially "did you guys just launch some missiles"; or more specifically, if anyone answered the hotline at the US end and didn't answer with "Die in nuclear fire, bear-fucker!", it could be assumed this was - at worse- an accidental launch. If no one picked up, then they would have gotten worried.
(The US (or the USSR for that matter) would be unlikely to lie if they had launched a strike. That makes you a diplomatic pariah in a time when you're going to want all the friends (or i suppose more realistically the fewest enemies) you can get. Either side would have just likely just refused to answer the hotline if they were actually launching a first strike; actually at the time, given the lack of missile counter measures, its just as likely the striking side would have called the other once they were sure their missiles were in RADAR range and said "We are declaring war". Diplomacy is funny, y'all)
So while the guy did stop the alert at his level, its not true he saved the world. It is very likely this would have been stopped at a higher level. The next level commander had a sort of anti-Western hard on and would likely have escalated the alert, but the Kremlin high command would have checked with their intelligence, have seen no NATO mobilization for an assault, and waited for ground-based RADAR to confirm.
The closest the world came to nuclear war post-Cuban Missle Crisis was actually post-USSR break up, and due to Norway launching a research satellite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
This incident was dangerous because Norway had informed Russia well in advance of the launch, but the information hadn't been disseminated properly. Russian SSBNs were put into a strike posture during the incident, and Russia's strike capability was put into readiness (the first level "get ready to receive launch orders" passwords had been sent out. The passphrases to arm the warheads & prep for launch were still sealed).
The "pressed button" was the first level "Yo, something's up" button.
fftopic: looked up some context and goddamn Matthews got a little savage in him. Context: Chris Matthews is going to interview Hilary Clinton, and he (like most sane people) is not a fan of the elitist HRC. "Can I have some of the queen’s waters? Precious waters? Where’s that Bill Cosby pill I brought with me?". To me it sounds like he wanted to drug himself to be able to sit through a Clinton interview.
