Cuban Missile Crisis a misplaced tape Times the world came close to nuclear disaster usatoday com story news politics 2022 10 12 cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-disaster-close-calls 10467849002 Josh Meyer USA TODAY 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 1 5 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 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 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 2 5 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 3 5 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 4 5 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 5 5