Short story about an astronaut dying while saving the Earth from missiles

Question

I read this story 1 or 2 years ago.
My details are a little bit foggy, but the main gist of the story is that an astronaut learns that some dastardly villain (I think he was posing as a philanthropist?) planned to launch missiles/nukes at the Earth. The night before the attack, the astronaut gets rid of the fuel (probably plutonium), and as he dies from radiation, he thinks about his wife and everybody back on Earth. Back on Earth, he's celebrated for his heroic deeds.

DavidW · Answer

This is Heinlein's "The Long Watch" (1949); the hero holes up in the missile magazine to prevent them being taken over by a would-be coup.  Because they can starve him out, he decides he needs to disable the missiles by smashing their plutonium cores.  The story ends with a (highly-radioactive) memorial to him.  It's been anthologised many times, but most commonly in the much-reprinted Heinlein anthology The Green Hills of Earth.
You can read it online (legally) at Baen.com
The scene that always stuck in memory for me is when he's sitting, after smashing the cores, smoking a cigarette, and even his breath is so radioactive it makes the Geiger counter shriek.

Short story about an astronaut dying while saving the Earth from missiles

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