Respectfully, I’m surprised that people like yourself are so ignorant of history
Such as when you wrote “They (the Soviet Union) were bluffing and we knew they were bluffing. They were never going to push any buttons.”
It is true that they didnt push buttons, but they were about to, and would have, but for one mid-ranking officer.
Try Googling “Vasily Arkhipov”
He was the Soviet naval officer who alone stopped the firing of a nuclear torpedo at the USS Randolph during the Cuban Missle crisis. His submarine was then being depth charged by American ships, and the other officers on the sub believed that war had broken out. He probably prevented a Nuclear war. One that would have killed hundreds of millions of people.
Kennedy’s political war-mongering brinkmanship didnt end up in unspeakable disaster due good fortune, a point seldom mentioned by Kennedy’s hagiogaphers It was an example of the phenomenon that was once described by Otto von Bismark when he stated this:
“God watches over drunks, small children, and the United States of America”
Let us pray that it still applies
“The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.”
What one lone ROGUE captain was going to do on their own has absolutely nothing to do with what Moscow would or would not have done. Why would you be all confused and not separate the two?