Growing up in the west I was of course influenced by western media with Hollywood on top. Allthough producing some remarcably good films Hollywood is probably also the worlds most efficient propaganda machinery. In the west we believe that the Americans liberated Europe from Nazi tyrrany which is only partly true. No doubt their efforts and sacrifice was an important contributor but without millions of Russian soldiers dying on the eastfront, D-day would never have been possible.

The cold war was part of my whole youth and when Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbatjov finally ended the cold war it was generally believed that it ended thanks to deescalation and negotiations. Closer to the truth is that is that we avoided nuclear armageddon due to chance more than through negotiations.

During the Cuban missile crisis 1962 a Russian nuclear armed submarine was depth-charged by US warships but one of the responsible officers onboard, Vasily Arkhipov, refused to launch nuclear torpedos most likely preventing a WW-III.

In September 1983 (when Pershing-II missiles were installed in west Germany) and at the height of tension between the two superpowers Lt-Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in charge of the Soviet air command. The early radar warning system interpreted what it thought was incoming US nuclear missiles. Petrov determined that it was a system malfunction and chose not to escalate the situation which would have been a full scale nuclear retalliation. In this way he prevented a global nuclear war.

That Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov didn´t get the Nobel peace price shows the politicization of the peace price.