(CNN) President Donald Trump said Friday that the US military had been 10 minutes away from a strike that could have killed 150 Iranians when he pulled the plug on the operation.

Bravo, said anyone nervous about the US launching military attacks on Iran, while wondering how Trump got that close to ordering a strike without realizing it would cost human life.

This is not the first time a US President pulled back from the brink of an attack.

Richard Nixon did it in 1969 after North Koreans shot down an unarmed US spy plane. Nixon was not worried about human life, but politics. According to The New York Times report at the time, he was concerned that Americans wouldn't back the move, which bore some similarities to bombings years earlier in the Gulf of Tonkin that presaged war in Vietnam.