I'd put 2 other names ahead of his: Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the A

I'd put 2 other names ahead of his: Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented, the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we couldn't feed any more people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process