It wasn't the only incident where the end of humankind was averted by a Soviet military with a brain and the courage to stand up against group think.

Vasili Arkhipov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know whether war had broken out.^[5] The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.^[6]

Three officers on board the submarine - Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov - were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch

Does anyone here know of an act of similar courage and ability to critical thinking on the western side? I don't. I suspect the west is far more successful to produce conformity and the absence of dissident thought.