About a week ago I read an extraordinary story at the BBC site about a British officer named James Blunt – now a popular singer – who may have single-handedly prevented World War III.

He was ordered by his commanding officer, the American general Wesley Clark, to attack a contingent of Russian troops during the NATO engagement in the Balkans in 1995.

Blunt refused to attack the airfield the Russians were guarding, and he was backed up by his own commander, General Mike Jackson.

Asked if following the order would have risked starting World War III, Blunt, who was a 25-year-old cavalry officer at the time, replied: “Absolutely. And that’s why we were querying our instruction from an American general.

“Fortunately, up on the radio came Gen Mike Jackson, whose exact words at the time were, ‘I’m not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III’, and told us why don’t we sugar off down the road, you know, encircle the airfield instead.

Blunt goes on to say:

“There are things that you do along the way that you know are right, and those that you absolutely feel are wrong, that I think it’s morally important to stand up against, and that sense of moral judgement is drilled into us as soldiers in the British army.”

Was Blunt guilty of insubordination? Perhaps. Did he prevent World War III from happening? The answer to that question must also be “perhaps.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union I had conversations at separate times with two Soviet military figures. One was General Geli Batenin, who told me in the autumn of 1991 that he was concerned about the certainty of central control over Russian mobile ICBMs. The country was falling apart then.

The other was Georgi Svyatov, one of the original designers of Soviet nuclear submarines. He told me that in the event of serious events in Moscow, ICBM crews might just snap, with catastrophic consequences.

Almost everyone assumes now that the chances of a nuclear exchange are almost nil. It may be though, that our situation is more precarious than we might care to admit. I sometimes wonder what would happen if there were a serious attack on Moscow, or for that matter, on some other world city. Would moral considerations play a role in deciding whether or not huge numbers of people would live or die?

Morality is not just a theory. It has life and death consequences.