Soviet Union

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet sub B-59 was hit by U.S. depth charges; its captain prepared a nuclear torpedo launch. All three senior officers had to agree, but Vasili Arkhipov alone refused. His no is credited with preventing Nuclear war.

During the Cold War, the CIA spent about $20 million on "Acoustic Kitty," implanting a microphone, battery and antenna inside a live cat to spy on Soviet diplomats. In its first field test, a taxi hit the cat near the Soviet Embassy. The CIA shut it down as impractical.

During the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) in World War II, at least nine Soviet botanists starved guarding a seed bank of 250,000 food crop samples. They refused to eat a single one—rice researcher Ivanov died amid thousands of bags of rice.

In the 1920s, Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a "Humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid. All experiments in Africa and the Soviet Union failed. Modern genetics confirmed this is impossible: humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimpanzees 24.

In 1983, during the Cold War, a Soviet Union early warning system detected 5 US missile launches. Officer Stanislav Petrov judged it a false alarm — reasoning the US would launch everything if starting a nuclear war. He was right: the satellite had mistaken sunlight for launch flashes.