I nominate Nikita Krushchev to be the most important figure in the cold war, literally playing 3d chess with a bloodthirsty imperialistic regime and preventing nuclear war.
Commenting on Kennedy’s government giving the OK to launch the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba:
“ If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”
-the man himself
Just want to add that Russian rocket experimentation actually predates the Soviet Union by a decade or so. IMO if the Soviets had prioritized them, they could have had V2-sized rockets before the Germans (but not prioritizing them was the right move, considering how useless the V2s ended up being in the grand scheme of things).
Not by that much. Quote from Boris Chertok’s Rockets and People, Vol. 1:
But you are correct in that not prioritizing them was the right move. The Soviets prioritized on solid fuel rockets and the result was the Katyushas that wreaked havoc on the German army. Focusing on developing V-2 like rockets would have been useless fighting against Nazi Germany.