"The Long Watch" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein.
In 1999, Lieutenant John Ezra Dahlquist is a member of the Space Patrol, an international organization with the custody of all Earth's remaining nuclear weapons.
Dahlquist leads Towers to believe that he will cooperate, but he does not want his family to live under a dictatorship and plans to stop the coup by preventing the bombs' use.
As Earth mourns the hero, his body is entombed in a marble monument, with an honor guard beyond the limit of safe approach.
As the protagonist dies at the end, he sees, standing around him, a number of heroes who sacrificed themselves for others in history, including Rodger Young, a soldier who died in World War II helping his unit retreat, who was recognized as a war hero at the time of the story.
In actual history, the possibility for such positioning of nuclear weapons on the Moon was averted, before the actual Moon landing in 1969, through the Outer Space Treaty, providing that With the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signing the treaty in 1967 and most other nations joining in later, there are not known to be any space-based nuclear weapons such as Heinlein envisioned.