Looking into this man's eyes, what do you see? A Russian general with stolid countenance, and deleterious intentions? Perhaps a cruel dictator, who displays as much emotion sipping a cuppa tea as ordering extermination? Or how about the savior, the last salvation, holding civilization above decimation? If you determined the latter, than the Cuban Missile Crisis is truly your ken.

This man is Vasili Arkhipov, and on October 27, 1962, he saved the world.

United States Navy Destroyers had been dropping depth charges off the coast of Cuba, attempting to surface Arkhipov's and his crew's nuclear submarine despite their location in international waters. Communication with Mother Russia had been severed for days, and their instructions were to launch the warheads if the crew came to unanimous agreement.

As their vessel dived deeper to avoid American detection, they lost all radio signals, even from U.S civilian stations. Their increasing depth paralleled the increasing tension between the two nuclear superpowers, America and Russia. For days, the crew had not the slightest notion if war had broken out or not.

 Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, the captain of the sub, explained in a tirade that he firmly believed war had broken out, and that the warheads should be launched as instructed. The two other officers aboard concurred, and Arkhipov remained the only Russian recalcitrant of triggering the beginning of the end. 

Incredibly, Arkhipov convinced the captain and other members to surface the sub and await orders from Moscow, essentially averting nuclear warfare.

The point to capitalized upon is this: the true heroes too often remain unspoken of. This man arguably saved the world from obliteration, and have you so much as heard his name mentioned in a history class? Nay. Instead, as Americans, we place value in which celebrity is most "beautiful," in which Kardashian popped out yet another fatherless child.

 So much emphasis is placed on bleached teeth and rippled abs, that true heroes, saviors, explorers, thinkers, revolutionaries, remain in the back of a history book, quietly tucked under the newest copy of People magazine.