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LONDON — Kevin Costner has done it, as has Robert De Niro and a delegation at the UN. But should you, too, feel like thanking the Man Who Saved the World in person, beware: it can be a difficult task. First, travel to Moscow and drive to a grimy village in the southern suburbs. Then, leaving nothing valuable in your car, head up the urine-stained stairwells of a crumbling, Soviet-era apartment block and look for a grouchy, stubbly pensioner.

This is Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who, at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, was in charge of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile early warning system. As reporters who have tracked him down testify, he will often shout at visitors to go away, or — at best — grudgingly admit: “I was just in the right place at the right time.”

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That he most certainly was. On the night of Sept. 26, 1983, Petrov was on duty at Serpukhov-15, a secret command station south of Moscow. His job was to analyze satellite data that would detect a pre-emptive nuclear first strike from the U.S. — a prospect that in Soviet minds, at least, was not unrealistic at that time. Just three weeks before, the Soviets had shot down a Korean jet carrying 269 passengers, including a U.S. Congressman and 60 other Americans, after wrongly suspecting it of being a spy plane. The incident pushed East-West tensions to their highest since the Cuban missile crisis and prompted Ronald Reagan’s infamous remark that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.”