Let's not forget the other Soviet soldier who prevented a nuclear war, absolute chad Vice Admiral Vasily Arkhipov , who kept his cool during the Cuban missile crisis.

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. Those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not.[6][7] The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[8]

Imagine being in that situation. Cut off from the world for days during a massive diplomatic and military crisis, sitting on a nuclear torpedo, with Americans dropping depth charges on your boat and your crew being convinced that the imperialists in their disregard for human life have started WW III.

The US also wanted to nuke Vietnam....and Korea....and China.

Good guys btw.

Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start;[1] that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly;[11] and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay.[12] However, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. He said that his colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile launch if they had been on his shift

Just a sensible person.

We make jokes about Xi sending the nukes, but they would only do that in retaliation.

Well, the centerpiece of the plot is that the US has secretly placed neutron bombs in every major population center in Europe, because they’d rather kill everyone than let them fall to communism.

Not sure if that’s portrayed as good or bad tho

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These people will twist reality to fit their preconceived notions. You could say "of Cuba staining nukes on their territory meant they wanted to nuke America then the US putting nukes in Turkey meant we wanted to nuke the USSR" and they'd probably just say "yes".

i am a fan of chess and caught the last few episodes. i liked it and was pleasantly surprised by the portrayal esp considering netflix's past portrayals of the USSR

Yeah I was really concerned it would go reaaaally bad after the Mexico City episode. And, well, it wasn't great in terms of portrayal but not bad either. The Russians started off pretty scary looking, then they became really cool and... The ending, well, it is definitely something that I haven't seen before in an American production.