20 Times Someone Had to Make an Impossible Phone Call

In September 1983, Soviet systems detected an imminent U.S. nuclear launch, and protocol required Petrov to escalate the situation, which would almost certainly have triggered retaliation. He instinctively judged it to be a false alarm, and his restraint may have been the most decisive decision of the Cold War.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine targeted by the Americans was carrying a nuclear torpedo that required authorization from three officers to launch, and two of them wanted to fire it. Arkhipov opposed the launch, the submarine surfaced, and the confrontation that could have erupted in the Atlantic did not take place.

Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, convinced that this would prevent a ground invasion that, according to estimates, would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. More than 200,000 people perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the debate has remained unresolved for the past eighty years.

According to some accounts, Churchill knew that Coventry was the target of German bombing raids in November 1940 and reportedly chose not to evacuate the city in order to keep secret the fact that Britain had cracked the Enigma code. Hundreds of civilians lost their lives there, and while this intelligence advantage may have helped shorten the war, it was a burden he bore alone.

At the start of the Civil War, Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, thereby authorizing the detention of civilians without trial—a power that the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress. Chief Justice Taney made this clear to him in no uncertain terms, but Lincoln pressed on regardless, arguing that the survival of the Union demanded it.

Kennedy rejected the proposal from his military advisers, who advocated immediate airstrikes against Soviet missile sites in Cuba, and opted for a naval blockade—a slower solution that left room for diplomacy. The blockade held, the missiles were removed, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have never stopped believing that he was too cautious.

Japanese Consul Sugihara, in Lithuania, issued transit visas to thousands of Jewish refugees after Tokyo had rejected his repeated requests for authorization, writing them out by hand for weeks. He helped approximately 6,000 people escape and was punished by his government for doing so after the war.

When Sophie Scholl was arrested while distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich in 1943, she could have claimed it was an accident or that she was unaware of the consequences, but she did not. She remained steadfast during her interrogation, used her trial as an opportunity to directly condemn the regime, and was executed four days later, at the age of twenty-one.

In 1796, Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox and then deliberately exposed him to smallpox to test his immunity—without an ethics committee and with no guarantee that the child would survive. The experiment was a success, laid the foundation for modern vaccination, and ultimately helped eradicate one of the deadliest diseases in history.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks remained seated in her seat when a white passenger asked her to give it up, fully aware of what the law said and what usually happened to Black people who did not comply. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

Schindler was a German businessman who ran a factory employing Jewish workers in occupied Poland and who, at one point, decided to prioritize the survival of his workers over profit. He spent his entire fortune—amassed during the war—on bribes and on relocating his factory, which was now destined to cease production; in doing so, he saved approximately 1,200 people and died penniless.

In the final seconds of the Apollo 11 descent, the navigation computer was steering the module toward a crater littered with rocks; Armstrong then took manual control while fuel levels were extremely low and landed the module with less than thirty seconds to spare. No one had ever landed on the Moon before, and mission control could not intervene.

After the Crimean War, Nightingale published data showing that far more British soldiers were dying from preventable infections than from war wounds, directly accusing the military establishment of negligence using charts she had developed herself. The reaction was fierce, as was the reform that followed.

In 1940, Pilecki deliberately allowed himself to be arrested so that he could be sent to Auschwitz, where he established a resistance network and reported on what was happening there, spending nearly three years in the camp before escaping. The Allied command largely dismissed his reports, deeming them too extreme to be credible.

In the early 20th century, Marie Curie had enough evidence to realize that radiation was harming her health and that she risked paying a heavy price by continuing her work, but she carried on nonetheless. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, and even today, her notebooks must be handled using lead-lined boxes and protective equipment.

In 1945, Army medic Doss went into battle at Hacksaw Ridge, refusing to carry a weapon for religious reasons. In a single night, he single-handedly evacuated about seventy-five wounded soldiers along the ridge, while everyone else had already withdrawn. He was awarded the Medal of Honor without ever firing a single shot.

After escaping slavery in 1849, Tubman returned to the South at least thirteen times, helping between seventy and eighty people escape via the Underground Railroad. Each time, she knew full well what capture would entail.

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Rusesabagina used his connections and all the influence he had to prevent militia commanders from attacking the more than 1,200 refugees who had sought shelter in his hotel for weeks. His methods were improvised and imperfect, but they saved lives while the world, for the most part, looked the other way.

In 1940, Turing advocated for a technical approach to cracking Enigma, an approach his team was skeptical of and for which military officials had no patience, forcing him, under pressure, to abandon the project entirely. The machine worked, and it is estimated that the intelligence advantage it provided helped shorten the war by two years.

After smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto for years, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and did not reveal the names of the members of her network, even when her legs and feet were broken during interrogation. She had helped about 2,500 children escape, and the coded lists of their identities, buried in jars under an apple tree, survived along with her.