By John Mark Young
“The war’s already started! We need to fire off our missiles!”
“You don’t know that the war’s started yet! We can’t just fire off ours unless you know for sure!”
“How much more proof do you need? We’ve tried and tried to reach our headquarters by radio and we don’t hear anything. They must have been hit and it’s up to us to do our duty and fire back!”
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Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a senior military advisor to the President of the United States,
John F. Kennedy would later look back and say that “This was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history.”
At the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s both the Soviet Union and the
The United States had hundreds of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) stored in silos throughout both countries ready to launch at each other if the high-ranking military officers on either side gave the official command to just do it…
Within two decades of the end of World War II, after nuclear bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to end the war, the whole world knew of the horrendous destruction and death that just a single nuclear bomb could inflict. Early on the Americans and the Soviets both developed the technology to build the bombs and mount them on missiles capable of being fired from one country and hitting a target in the enemy’s country on the other side of the world.
At first, each of the nuclear powers had built just a few of the missiles to be able to inflict that horrible damage on only a few of the enemy’s main military bases and command centers to cripple them if they ever started a war. But then, over time, each side began to build more and more of them until they both had to face the facts–if either side ever did wind up launching all of their missiles at the other side–it would be Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) for both sides as well as for much of the rest of the world too.
Neither side really wanted to do that, even to an enemy, but both sides certainly didn’t want that possibility of destruction to be inflicted upon them. Over time the strategy evolved from wanting to be able to inflict crippling destruction upon your enemy to deterring your enemy from firing their missiles at you so you wouldn’t fire yours at them.
Ironically, that strategy of deterrence has kept the two largest superpowers on our planet from going to all-out war against each other for over half a century so far.
But what if–what if–something went wrong and a nuclear missile was launched by accident? Would that start a nuclear war that nobody wanted or even intended?
Both sides over time have developed very sophisticated nuclear weapons to be launched from a “triad” of platforms– some as missiles launched from land, some as missiles launched from submarines, and some as bombs to be dropped from bombers capable of flying around the world. That makes them more flexible to deploy and also harder for the enemy to take out on a first strike.
It also makes them harder to coordinate and control from a central launch command authority somewhere back home…
In the beginning, most of the launch pads, at least from missile launch sites and from bomber bases, were on the other side of the world for both of the superpowers. But then Fidel
Castro, a communist dictator, took over Cuba just off the coast of Florida and wanted to side with his fellow communists in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets saw this as a golden opportunity to get the best of us and began shipping their nuclear missiles to be based in Cuba. That meant that the travel time from launch to impact on our nation’s capitol would be less than an hour–not enough time to even respond.
At least, if a missile were launched from the other side of the world, it would take several hours to impact and that would be time to identify, assess the danger, and give the order to retaliate.
What’s now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 16th, 1962 when we first discovered that the Soviets were building missile sites that close to us in Cuba. That’s the closest that we–and the rest of the world–have come to a nuclear holocaust.
Thankfully, those tense times are now in our fairly distant past. But the heroic actions of the heroes–who were actually our enemies and saved both us and their home countries from war–deserve to be remembered…
[To be continued]
