Cuban Missile Crisis, a misplaced tape: Times the world came close to nuclear disaster

Six decades before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first showdown between nuclear powers that historians say could have sparked a global Armageddon.

President Joe Biden cited that confrontation, which began exactly 60 years this week, when accusing Putin last week of bringing the world to the brink of a potential nuclear attack. .

Nuclear security experts interviewed by USA TODAY, including former military and intelligence officials, agree with Biden that Putin has brought the world to a more precarious point now than at any time since the U.S.-Soviet standoff in Cuba began on Oct. 16, 1962.

After determining that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had shipped ballistic missiles and trainers to its ally Cuba, President John F. Kennedy blockaded the island just south of Florida, putting the two superpowers on the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev ultimately capitulated and dismantled the missiles, while Kennedy disbanded U.S. missile sites in Turkey.

Those experts vary widely in their assessments of how likely it is that Putin will use a nuclear weapon in his ongoing war against Ukraine. But all of them worry that a nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. could happen accidentally, even if neither side intentionally wanted one.

History shows that there is that potential. Here’s a look at some of the close calls of the past:

Putin and nukes: Biden's 'Armageddon' nuclear warning builds on increasing worries about a desperate Putin

A Russian lieutenant colonel stands down

Most of the experts USA TODAY talked to described various scenarios in which a confrontation between Russia and the U.S. or other adversaries could “go nuclear” by accident.

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The most common ones usually involve the escalation of a minor skirmish due to miscommunication, or the failure to understand or observe each other’s respective red lines that determine when they would feel it necessary to retaliate. And there's always the possibility of equipment malfunction.

Consider the case of Stanislav Petrov, a Russian lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces who in all likelihood single-handedly averted a nuclear superpower war in 1983.

That September, the Soviet military shot down an unarmed Korean Air Lines jetliner over Soviet airspace, killing all 239 people aboard – including a U.S. congressman from Georgia. East-West relations were extremely tense.

At the time, Petrov, 44, was part of an elite team that used a new state-of-the-art computerized system to monitor the Soviet satellites that, in turn, were on alert for nuclear missile launches by the U.S.

Early one early morning, Petrov was working the overnight shift as the duty officer at a Soviet nuclear early-warning facility when it reported that five or more intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from the United States.

"The siren howled,'' Petrov recalled in a 2013 interview with the BBC Russia service. "I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, backlit, red screen with the word 'launch' on it.''

But Petrov's training had indicated that in a U.S. nuclear strike, dozens of warheads would rain down on Russia, not just a handful. So, disobeying standing orders and acting against Kremlin military protocol, he made the call that it was a false alarm.

Had Petrov acted as protocol required, the Soviets “likely would have ordered a massive retaliatory strike on the United States, very probably ending life as we know it. Instead, he waited,” said Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. in a 2019 House floor speech honoring Petrov as “the man who saved mankind.”

Petrov was later proven correct. It turns out that the fancy new computer malfunctioned.

"They were lucky it was me on shift that night,'' Wilson quoted Petrov as saying sometime before his death – in obscurity – at the age of 77.

“That," Wilson told fellow lawmakers, "is putting it mildly.”

False alarms and other close calls

There have been other near-disasters, including some that also came about as the result of technological glitches, according to Sharon Squassoni, who served three decades as a senior U.S. nuclear nonproliferation and arms control official.

Squassoni now co-chairs the committee of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that sets the “Doomsday Clock,” which is now "at doom's doorstep," at 100 seconds to midnight. The group convenes next month in Chicago to vote on whether Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine and other threats require a resetting of the clock even closer to Armageddon time.

During the Cold War, in fact, there were numerous false alarms of missile launches, including some disclosed much later by the Washington-based National Security Archive. There were four occasions during the administration of President Jimmy Carter alone when warning screens showed Soviet ballistic missiles heading toward North America.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry disclosed one jarring case in his 2016 memoir, “My Journey on the Nuclear Brink,” at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command.

As a senior Pentagon official in November 1979, Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at NORAD who urgently reported that his computers were showing 200 Soviet missiles in flight toward the United States.

Perry, who was also instrumental in helping the U.S. de-escalate the Cuban Missile Crisis 17 years earlier, thought a nuclear World War III was underway. The watch officer, though, believed it was a computer error and – like his Russian counterpart Petrov – turned out to be right.

It turned out that someone had carelessly left a tape in a NORAD computer that simulated a large Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S., “and people didn't know it was a training tape,” Squassoni recalls.

Years later, senior State Department adviser Marshall Shulman cited the 1979 scare in lamenting that “false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence,” and that there is a “complacency about handling them that disturbs me,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“So you can look at close calls, and there are those types of things," Squassoni said. "And then there's the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Miscalculations on both sides

In that crisis, there were more than enough mistakes to go around.

The Soviets didn’t think the administration of new President JKennedy would react so forcefully to a clandestine Soviet effort to put nuclear warheads just south of the southern U.S. border. And the U.S. badly underestimated how far along, and how massive, the Soviet effort was, Squassoni said.

“And so in that way, I would say we are not quite close to the Cuban Missile Crisis because we are not yet directly opposing Russia by our own decisions,” Squassoni told USA TODAY.

But Squassoni and other analysts said there is another concern – Russia could launch a nuclear strike on purpose. And they note that Moscow has been training for just such a confrontation, in whatever scenario it may present itself, for decades.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cuban Missile Crisis: Times the world came close to nuclear disaster