BRUSHES WITH ARMAGEDDON

Humanity came close to self-annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Broken Arrows’ and other nuclear near misses

By the early 1960s the US and the USSR were rival superpowers with enough nuclear weapons to wipe one another off the face of the earth, along with everybody else. In theory this stand-off kept the peace, but in late 1962 humanity found itself facing Armageddon.

On 14 October, a US U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being constructed on communist Cuba, less than 100 miles (160km) from Florida. On 22 October, US President John F Kennedy revealed the extent of the crisis in a TV address to the nation. "My fellow citizens," he said, "within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on [Cuba].

"Several... include medium-range ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead... more than 1,000 miles [making them] capable of striking Washington, DC...or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States. It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." For a week, the world held its breath as Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev sought a diplomatic solution to the crisis. In the end, it took a secret deal to pull the world back from the brink. The USSR would remove the missiles from Cuba in return for the US removing the missiles it had pointed at the Soviet Union from Turkey. A nuclear holocaust had been averted, but only just.