[shahadi]

Originally Posted by Weasel

Were you around in the 80s? I believe they say at one point we were 5 seconds from nuclear war.

Originally Posted by Imp

Probably a bit dramatic minutes rather than seconds, most known incidents the West was the culprit but 1983 was Russia's year.

The close one was Russia mistaking a military exercise for the real deal.
Friend of mine was in the signal core at the time in a mobile monitoring post. When they realised the Russians were as scared as them they contacted their counterparts directly in an effort to diffuse the situation, lot of unsanctioned chatter that day.

The other one in 1983 did not amount to much the Russians detected missile launches but who ever was in charge took a gamble & did not report it. Turned out to be a satellite glitch.

It made have been the NATO exercise dubbed Able Archer 83.

I remember duck and cover drills and the stories my big brother told of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was a scary time. I imagine on reflection, today's school "active shooter drills" are more intense and "real" than my "duck and cover drills" from grade school.

So, here is a list I feel warrants incidents nearing all-out war as GOATs:

1. In October 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. came to the brink of nuclear war during what’s become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

2. Maultsby's U-2 Spy Plane Incident

On October 27, 1962, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its boiling point, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Alaska en route to a routine reconnaissance mission near the North Pole. Pilot Charles Maultsby was supposed to use celestial navigation to find his way, but halfway through the trip his view of the night sky became hopelessly obscured by the glow of the aurora borealis, or “northern lights.” With no visual markers to guide him, Maultsby soon drifted far off course and inadvertently crossed the border into the Soviet Union.

Because the situation in Cuba still rested on a knife-edge, Maultsby’s accidental detour carried possibly catastrophic consequences. Worried the U-2 could be a nuclear bomber, the Soviets scrambled several MiG fighter jets and sent them on a course to destroy the intruding aircraft. The Air Force responded by dispatching two F-102 fighters armed with nuclear-tipped missiles to shepherd Maultsby back to Alaska. Any confrontation between the two groups of aircraft could have potentially ended in all-out war, but Maultsby managed to glide his U-2—which had long since run out of fuel—out of Soviet airspace before he could be intercepted.

3. The B-59 Submarine Incident

That same day, a minor incident aboard a Soviet submarine might stand as the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. On October 27, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the American destroyer USS Beale began dropping depth charges on the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59, which was lurking near the U.S. blockade line around Cuba. The charges were non-lethal warning shots intended to force B-59 to the surface, but the submarine’s captain mistook them for live explosives. Convinced he was witnessing the opening salvo of World War III, the captain angrily ordered his men to arm the sub’s lone nuclear-tipped torpedo and prepare for attack.

The misunderstanding could have resulted in disaster if not for a contingency measure that required all three of the submarine’s senior officers to sign off on a nuclear launch. The Soviet captain was in favor, but Vasili Arkhipov, B-59’s second in command, refused to give his consent. After calming the captain down, Arkhipov coolly convinced his fellow officers to bring B-59 to the surface and request new orders from Moscow. The submarine eventually returned to Russia without incident, but it was over 40 years before a full account of Arkhipov’s life-saving decision finally came to light.

4. The Able Archer 83 Exercise

Although it was not widely known at the time, declassified government documents have since revealed that a November 1983 NATO war game nearly saw the United States and the Soviet Union come to blows. The source of the misunderstanding was an exercise known as Able Archer 83, which was supposed to simulate how a conventional attack on Europe by the Soviet Union could eventually be met by a U.S. nuclear strike. Such simulations were not uncommon during the Cold War, but the Able Archer mission differed from the usual protocol in both its scope and realism. In preparation for the war game, the United States airlifted 19,000 troops to Europe, changed its alert status to DEFCON 1 and moved certain commands to alternate locations—all steps that typically would only be taken in times of war.

For the Soviets, these maneuvers perfectly matched their own predictions for how the Americans would set the table for a nuclear offensive. While they knew a war game was taking place, they were also wary that it could be a ruse to cover up preparations for a real world attack. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the Soviets had soon gone into high alert and readied their nuclear arsenal, with some units in East Germany and Poland even preparing their fighter jets for takeoff. They remained poised for a counterstrike until November 11, when the Able Archer exercise ended without incident. Only later did NATO and the United States realize that their realistic simulation of World War III had very nearly led to the real thing.

Source: http://www.history.com/news/history-...ar-close-calls