alt Hacker NewsThere were occasions where a "hunch" was all that stopped a nuclear war - most available data and communication pointed towards a nuclear war starting according to their instructions, but someone disagreed and overrode. See Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Stanislav Petrov in 1983.
Good thing we got better at process design, taking these stubborn machos finally out of the decision making loop