The Brink Of Annihilation: Unveiling History’s Close Calls With Nuclear Catastrophe

On that day 41 years ago, Petrov, the deputy chief for combat algorithms at Serpukhov-15, the then center of the Soviet’s nuclear early-warning system, was on duty when the alarms went off. According to the flashing lights on the giant map of the Northern Hemisphere that occupied a wall, America had launched a single nuclear missile from Montana, and it was on its way across the Arctic to hit Moscow.

Petrov’s responsibilities were simple. In case of a nuclear attack, he was to inform his superiors of the pending strike, which would have led to an immediate and compulsory counterattack from the Soviet Union. But Petrov did not send any messages. For him, this was not how the world ends, as the Americans surely wouldn’t rely on a single missile for a nuclear first strike. It had to be a fault in the system. Petrov was right and his calm thinking saved countless lives from a nuclear war.

While this may feel like an isolated “near-miss”, it is just one example of nail-biting situations – caused by false alarms, misunderstandings, or accidents – that could have had dire implications had things gone differently. It seems we have been brought to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe on multiple occasions since the 1950s, and most of us had no idea it was even going on. But how close is “close”?

The highest stakes 

To be sure, nuclear weapons represent a challenging and controversial achievement of modern science. It is probably fair to say that no other technology has more destructive potential than these weapons. According to some estimates, it would take less than 0.1 percent of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal to decimate complex life on Earth and usher in wide-scale agricultural collapse and famine. But despite this raw power, nuclear weapons have only ever been used twice in an actual conflict, by the Americans against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

This fact, the lack of use outside of military testing, has become something of a puzzle for many people. To some, especially within more conservative circles, the absence of use, accidental or otherwise, is a testament to the systems designed to maintain and guard them (nuclear safety and security) as well as the power of the nuclear deterrence policy. To others, however, the fact that we have not yet witnessed nuclear war, or a substantial accident, has more to do with luck than anything else.

I think it is banal to say the stakes are high when it comes to this subject, but the history of the last 70 years has shown that things can get precariously close to the edge. 

It is true that nuclear weapons are designed with several fail-safes to prevent accidental or unauthorized launches /detonations, and that most of the past near-misses have only been the result of one or two things going wrong (which means they were never a serious risk). But the fact that system failures can occur means that we should not underestimate the possibility that everything will always be resolved without incident. History has shown us that large system errors, especially ones exacerbated by confusion and pressure during a crisis, can lead to unexpected outcomes.

Here are some more historical near-misses that illustrate how tense things can be.

Coincidences amass 

As mentioned above, nuclear weapons are advanced technologies that have multiple sophisticated fail-safes to protect them (and us). However, a confluence of signal errors, paranoia, and other factors can make the situation very messy, especially at times of heightened tension.

In November 1956, during the Suez Crisis, when Britain and France attempted to rekindle their fading imperial prestige by seizing the Suez Canal, a series of confused signals nearly caused a nuclear exchange.

On November 5, the Soviet Government had suggested to the US that they cooperate to end the conflict and warned both former imperial powers that they would bomb London and Paris if they were ignored. That night, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) received news that unidentified aircraft were traveling over Turkey, that there were 100 Soviet MiG-15 fighter planes flying over Syria, that a British Canberra bomber had been shot down over Syria, and that the Soviet Black Sea Fleet were moving through the Dardanelles (the Strait of Gallipoli), suggesting an offensive strike.

According to reports, General Andrew Goodpaster, Staff Secretary and Defense Liaison Officer to President Eisenhower, thought the signs would trigger NATO’s plans to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. But what really happened is an example of how coincidence and paranoia are dangerous bedfellows as each event was something completely unrelated.

For instance, the “aircrafts” over Tukey were actually flocks of swans, the MiG jets were escorting the president of Syria home after a visit to Moscow, the British plane crashed due to malfunctions, and the Soviet fleet was simply carrying out scheduled exercises.

Mistaken identity and intentions

On October 5, 1960, NORAD had another scare. According to a report from the early warning radar system at Thule, Greenland, a Soviet missile had been launched against the US, which put the organization on high alert. However, something significant suggested this may not be correct: Nikita Khrushchev, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, was actually in New York at the time, which made the chances of this being a real attack less likely. So, what caused the system alert? Well, it turns out the radar had confused the moonrise over Norway for an all-out nuclear attack.

Though the 1960 moonrise incident may seem entertaining, the reality of what it nearly caused is less so. In another case of mistaken identity, one far more conceivable, things also got tense.

In November 1983, only a few months after Petrov’s steady thinking prevented a nuclear war, another instance of misunderstanding and mistaken intentions brought the superpowers closer than ever to war. At the time, the US and NATO decided to run a significant training exercise, known as Able Archer 83, to simulate NATO’s transition to nuclear conflict from conventional alternatives.

This, to an outside observer, looked like the US and its NATO allies had moved their defensive readiness to DEFCON 1 – the highest of the nuclear threat categories which was more severe than DEFCON 2, which had been reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Unfortunately, the Soviet military, the outside observers in this case, interpreted it as a sign of an imminent attack, which led them to mount their own response.

According to recently declassified documents, the then Chief of the Soviet Air Forces, Marshal Pavel S. Kutakhov, ordered the Soviet 4^th Army Air Force in Eastern Europe to prepare “for the immediate use of nuclear weapons”. This involved actively loading nuclear bombs onto combat planes in preparation for a retaliatory strike. In addition, the then Soviet Leader, Yuri Andropov, was handed the “nuclear briefcase”, otherwise known as the “cheget”.

This sudden escalation in Soviet activity was itself interpreted with concern back in Washington. But rather than ratcheting up Western asset alert levels, Leonard H. Perroots, a high-ranking intelligence officer for the US Air Force who was stationed in Europe at the time, decided to play for time. Thankfully, the Soviets soon realized they had been witnessing an exercise, and tensions began to ease again.

But it was a close call. In 1990, a then-classified report by the US President’s Foreign Intelligence Review Board (PFIAB) concluded that “In 1983 we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”

The cost of it all

Regardless of your political views on nuclear weapons, whether you think they are a valid tool for ensuring peace or something that should be banned, there is no denying they represent a terrifying ambiguity. Since they first emerged on the international stage during the late 1940s and 1950s, there have been numerous near misses and mistakes that could have gone very differently. In fact, the cases mentioned here are just a few of the known examples.

It is easy to believe that both the US and Russia, as well as all the other nuclear weapon states, probably have far more near-miss situations that have yet to be declassified for public eyes. This reality, this dangerous ambiguity, continued to be an important factor contributing to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ decision to keep the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, in January this year.

The costs of a nuclear war today would be devastating. We know this because the history of their development and testing during the second half of the 20^th century has had a massive impact on the environment.

Aside from consuming funds for their upkeep, funds that might otherwise be spent on various other domestic and international initiatives to combat things like climate change, decades of nuclear tests have left a lasting toxic legacy for places like the Marshall Islands and the people who once called them home. In addition to the test sites in the South Pacific, other places like Nevada, Kazakhstan, China, India, and Pakistan have also witnessed irreversible ecological damage from weapons testing.

These weapons may represent the heights of human technology, but as these historical cases indicate, one mistake, one misinterpretation at a time of heightened tension could well be the difference between calculated brinkmanship or utter disaster. Or, as Nate Jones, senior fellow at the US National Security Archives, told Smithsonian Magazine in 2022, “The danger of brinksmanship […] is it’s easier than we think for one side to fall into the brink.”