WARNING. This article may be nuked (not to joke about the real thing).
The real question is, was it really all that much of a close call. What would it take for a superpower to decide, “f*** it. I’m gonna destroy the world.”
Wow. What a list. Thanks for posting. I may have seen it before but don’t recall this many items.
One episode —
“25 October 1962
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, United States military planners expected that sabotage operations might precede any nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union.
Around midnight on 25 October 1962, a guard at the Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at it and activated the sabotage alarm, which automatically set off similar alarms at other bases in the region. At Volk Field in Wisconsin, a faulty alarm system caused the klaxon to sound instead, which ordered Air Defense Command (ADC) nuclear-armed F-106A interceptors into the air.
The pilots had been told there would be no practice alert drills and, according to political scientist Scott D. Sagan, “fully believed that a nuclear war was starting”.
Before the planes were able to take off, the base commander contacted Duluth and learned of the error. An officer in the command center drove his car onto the runway, flashing his lights and signaling to the aircraft to stop. The intruder was discovered to be a bear.”
Bk
“Commenting on the incident, U.S. State Department adviser Marshall Shulman stated that “false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me.”[36] Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev composed a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter that the false alarm was “fraught with a tremendous danger” and “I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters.”[38] In the months following the incident there were three more false alarms at NORAD,”
Holy crap late-term donkey party military degradation fostered by executive branch galactic incompetence!
That’s not even close to the incidents that might have escalated into nukes being exchanged.