History is cyclical, and the world has experienced moments of crisis more than once, but sooner or later everything came to an end and ended well. Five proofs of this are in our material.
black saturday
On October 16 – 28, 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis fell – An extremely tense political, diplomatic and military conflict between the USSR and the USA brought humanity to the brink when the Cold War could turn into a nuclear war. The penultimate day of the crisis, October 27, would later be called “Black Saturday” – on this day the Soviet air defense team shot down pilot Rudolf Anderson’s U-2 over Cuba and a few hours later over Cuba. anti-aircraft guns fired at two US Navy photographic reconnaissance aircraft. They demanded decisive measures and a retaliatory strike from John F. Kennedy, who later served as President of America, but did not lose hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, meanwhile, Fidel Castro offered Nikita Khrushchev to launch. Preemptive nuclear attack on the United States. The latter, fortunately, said that “comrade Fidel Castro” had lost his courage and that negotiations with the Americans were going well. So “Black Saturday” became the day the world came closest to a global nuclear war, but all went well.
call at three in the morning
On November 9, 1979, as the relative truce between the Soviet Union and America grew tense again (within a month, the USSR will send troops to Afghanistan and the United States will boycott the Moscow Olympics), he was awakened by the US National Security Assistant. an urgent phone call. A representative of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) informed Zbigniew Brzezinski that the USSR had launched 250 missiles on American soil. During the confirmation of the information, the data was updated: according to them, 2,200 missiles had already been launched. Six minutes passed from the moment the alarm was announced to its cancellation, the army initiated emergency protocols in the event of a nuclear war, warplanes were lifted into the air, a call to the president was being prepared, and the third call had saved humanity from danger. a disaster – it turned out that there was no attack. The fact is that one of the technicians downloaded a training program to the computer to practice actions in case of a Soviet attack.
Almost catastrophic computer error
The fall of 1983 went down in history as the most intense period of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A few months ago, in the spring of that year, Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative program, and the US military began preparations for the deployment of Pershing 2 missiles in Western Europe, with a flight time of just six minutes to Moscow. This shortened the time required for the USSR’s decision to respond, and the Soviet leadership, of course, perceived America’s actions as an attempt to achieve victory in a nuclear war. By autumn, the situation was extremely tense, and even more alarming against this background was the event that occurred on September 26, 1983. Then the Oko system, the space stage of the Soviet missile attack warning system, gave a false signal about the launch of several missiles from American soil.
Light and audible alarms were activated, and Stanislav Petrov, the operational officer of the command center (who, by the way, just replaced a sick colleague) should have immediately informed the authorities about the incident, but did not. The fact is that he did not see the flares and smoke of flames from the rockets that are characteristic of this process, and also realized that the radar warning did not confirm this and concluded that the warning system may malfunction. In addition, he thought that in a war situation the Americans would use their entire arsenal, and not just a few missiles from one base.
And the next 15-20 minutes were the longest in Stanislav Petrov’s life – that’s how long it took for the alleged missiles to appear on the radars of the second echelon of the Soviet warning system. But time ran out and nothing happened, and it later turned out that the cause of the system’s malfunctioning was the sun’s rays reflecting off the high-altitude clouds. Thus, Stanislav Petrov became the man who prevented a nuclear war.
On the brink of war with no connection to the world
Another event that occurred on Black Saturday, October 27, 1962. On that day, the Soviet diesel submarine “B-59”, with nuclear weapons on board, was fired by 11 US Navy destroyers (according to the Soviet side, depth charges were also used). To get away from the American ships, the submarine had to go to the maximum depth at which radio signals were not received. This means that no one on board knows what is happening on the surface.
In the end, commander Valentin Savitsky gave the order to prepare nuclear warhead torpedoes for launch, and everyone tells differently what happened in the next B-59. According to the recollections of one of the witnesses, Ilya Maslennikov, deputy commander of the political work, and second-degree captain Vasily Arkhipov (who also served as the chief of staff of the submarine brigade) assured the commander, and, according to Western historians, only Vasily Arkhipov’s self-control saved the world from a nuclear war.
He did not officially command the B-59, but was veteran on board by stat, meaning that the decision to use nuclear weapons requires his consent. He didn’t, thus preventing a disaster.
Norwegian missile incident
On January 25, 1995, Boris Yeltsin, who was then President of Russia, pressed just one button from launching a nuclear strike. Then Russian radars detected a missile launch off the coast of Norway – it looked like the launch of a combat ballistic missile from a nuclear submarine, and it was impossible to understand the trajectory of its movement due to vertical take-off. “Nuclear suitcases” were mobilized by Russian President, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and Chief of Staff Mikhail Kolesnikov, Russian missile forces were put on full alert, but it soon became clear that the missile was moving away from the country’s territory. So it didn’t pose a threat. It was later known to be Black Brant XII, a Norwegian-American research rocket with scientific equipment to study the aurora.
Source: People Talk
I’m Roger Gritton, and I’ve been writing for the The Fashion Vibes for over 5 years now. My specialty is beauty news; I’m passionate about covering the latest trends, products, and innovations in the industry. In my time there, I’ve become known as an authority on all things beauty-related.
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