It sounds like hindsight bias, to act like, because we now know that it was a false alarm, it must have been obvious without the later knowledge.

I guess his intelligence was involved somewhat. Also, I'm not sure why I thought that was all that relevant. I wouldn't reward someone for doing something that they convinced themselves would save the world. That doesn't really apply to Petrov.

Are you saying that Petrov had superhero level powers, and so his act was relatively trivial?

It was luck instead of powers, but basically. It wasn't that he's a superhero per se. It's just the same sort of extreme version of the halo effect. He was in a situation where he could do extreme good at extremely low cost, which makes him seem really heroic without actually being very heroic at all.