{"id":16172414,"date":"2026-08-25T11:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T09:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/four-closest-calls-nuclear-war-korea-berlin-cuba-able-archer\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T11:23:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T09:23:03","slug":"four-closest-calls-nuclear-war-korea-berlin-cuba-able-archer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/four-closest-calls-nuclear-war-korea-berlin-cuba-able-archer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Four Closest Calls Since 1945"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style>\r\n\r\n<p>The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third world war came close to starting one instead. In three of those cases the decisive factor was not a treaty or a hotline. It was a single person deciding not to do the thing they were entitled to do.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Here are the four moments, and what aviation had to do with each of them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f5f5f5;padding:20px;border-radius:8px;margin:24px 0;font-size:15px;line-height:1.8\"><strong style=\"font-size:17px\">Informations cl\u00e9s<\/strong><br><strong>Korea, 1950&ndash;51:<\/strong> MacArthur requested atomic bombs; nine Mark 9 warheads released to military control<br><strong>Berlin, October 1961:<\/strong> US and Soviet tanks muzzle-to-muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie for over 24 hours<br><strong>Cuba, October 1962:<\/strong> a U-2 shot down, and a Soviet submarine officer refuses to authorise a nuclear torpedo<br><strong>Able Archer, November 1983:<\/strong> a NATO command exercise mistaken for cover for a real first strike<br><strong>Soviet response in 1983:<\/strong> aircraft in Poland and East Germany loaded with nuclear bombs, SS-20s on high alert<br><strong>Stand-down:<\/strong> 11 November 1983, when the exercise ended<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">1. Korea: The General Who Wanted the Bomb<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>The first crisis arrived barely five years after Nagasaki. When Chinese forces poured across the Yalu in late 1950 and threw United Nations troops back down the peninsula, General Douglas MacArthur asked Washington to consider nuclear weapons and requested discretion to use them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>His target list ran to dozens of aim points, many of them inside China. He floated bombing Beijing. He raised the idea of laying a belt of radioactive material along the Manchurian border as a permanent barrier.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>He did not get authorisation. But this was not simply a general talking. In April 1951 Truman released nine Mark 9 warheads to military control, over the objections of the Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Gordon Dean. That October, under Operation Hudson Harbor, B-29s flew practice runs from Okinawa to North Korea with dummy bombs, rehearsing the full sequence of an atomic strike, from weapon assembly through to bomb aiming, to prove the capability worked and to make sure Moscow and Beijing knew it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Truman fired MacArthur on 11 April 1951. Historians still argue about how much the nuclear question drove that decision, but the effect was to settle a constitutional point that had been dangerously vague: the bomb belongs to the president, not to the theatre commander.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">2. Berlin, 1961: Twenty-Four Hours of Loaded Guns<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>Berlin was the Cold War&rsquo;s permanent open wound. In 1961 it nearly went septic.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The trigger was almost comically small. On 22 October, the senior American diplomat in West Berlin, E. Allan Lightner Jr., tried to cross into the East at Checkpoint Charlie and was stopped by East German guards demanding to see his papers. Allied policy held that only Soviet officials, not East Germans, had any authority over Allied movement in Berlin. A dispute about a passport became a dispute about who actually governed the city.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>On 26 October the US Army moved ten M48 tanks and three M59 armoured personnel carriers up to the checkpoint. The next day Soviet tanks rolled into position opposite them. For more than twenty-four hours the two lines sat roughly a hundred yards apart with their main guns trained on each other, in the middle of a city, in front of a crowd of Berliners who understood exactly what they were looking at.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=863349226  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:CIQL.cf6b\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/u-2-reconnaissance-photo-cuban-missile-crisis-1962.jpg\" alt=\"U-2 reconnaissance photograph of a Soviet missile site in Cuba, 1962\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">A U-2 frame of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile site in Cuba. Photo-reconnaissance started the 1962 crisis and then had to sustain it. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>On the morning of 28 October the Soviet tanks reversed out. The American tanks followed shortly after. Not a shot was fired, no one was hurt, and neither government ever publicly acknowledged the quiet back-channel that arranged the simultaneous withdrawal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The Wall itself, going up since August, is remembered as the crisis&rsquo;s brutal resolution. It was an inhuman answer to the refugee problem that had driven Khrushchev&rsquo;s ultimatums, and it did lower the temperature, because it removed the thing both sides had been escalating over.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0gIwhTCq3a8\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n<p style=\"font-size:14px;color:#666;text-align:center;margin-top:-8px\"><em>How a passport check put American and Soviet tanks muzzle-to-muzzle in a European capital.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">3. Cuba, 1962: The Man in the Submarine<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>The Cuban Missile Crisis is the one everybody knows, and it is usually told as a story about two leaders. The closest call had nothing to do with either of them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>27 October 1962 is remembered as Black Saturday. That was the day Major Rudolf Anderson&rsquo;s U-2 was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile, killing him and removing one of the few remaining excuses not to invade. We have <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">written about Anderson separately<\/a>, along with the <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/f-101-voodoo-cuban-missile-crisis-recon\/\">low-level Voodoo reconnaissance runs<\/a> that kept Washington supplied with imagery.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The same day, far below the surface, the US Navy was dropping practice depth charges on the Soviet submarine B-59 to force it up. The boat had been out of radio contact, its air was foul, the interior temperature was brutal, and the crew had no idea whether the war had already started. B-59 carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered it armed. Firing required the agreement of three men, and one of them was Vasili Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine flotilla, who happened to be aboard and who outranked Savitsky. Arkhipov argued that the Americans were signalling rather than attacking, on the logic that nobody wastes practice charges on a submarine if a general war is already under way. He refused. The boat surfaced.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #1565c0;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7\"><em>&ldquo;the man who saved the world&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Thomas Blanton<\/strong> &mdash; Director of the National Security Archive, on Vasili Arkhipov<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>The compromise between Kennedy and Khrushchev came together within hours of a decision to strike. It is worth sitting with the fact that the thinnest margin of the entire Cold War came down to one officer in a hot, stale compartment declining to give his consent.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0lP_ICJo_Jg\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n<p style=\"font-size:14px;color:#666;text-align:center;margin-top:-8px\"><em>The thirteen days, and how narrowly they resolved.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">4. Able Archer 83: The Exercise That Looked Real<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>The last one is the one almost nobody knew about until the files came out, and it is arguably the most frightening, because nobody involved on the Western side thought anything unusual was happening at all.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Able Archer was NATO&rsquo;s annual command-post exercise rehearsing the procedures for escalating to nuclear release. The 1983 edition, run in early November and ending on the 11th, was different. It used a new coded communications format, periods of radio silence, and the notional participation of heads of government. It was, in short, extremely realistic.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>It landed in the worst possible year. The Soviet leadership was already convinced that Washington might be planning a first strike. Pershing II missiles were arriving in Europe with flight times to Moscow measured in minutes. Soviet intelligence residencies in Western Europe had been ordered to watch for the indicators of an imminent attack, and an exercise designed to look exactly like preparation for a nuclear release generated precisely those indicators.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=1297476365  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:KtcK.cf6c\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/08\/pershing-ii-missile-test-launch-1982.jpg\" alt=\"Pershing II missile test launch, 1982\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">A Pershing II on test in 1982. Its arrival in Europe compressed Moscow&rsquo;s warning time to minutes and coloured how the Soviets read everything NATO did. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>Moscow acted on what it saw. Aircraft in Poland and East Germany were loaded with nuclear weapons. SS-20 intermediate-range missiles went to high alert. Ballistic missile submarines were moved under the Arctic ice, where they would be hard to find and hard to stop.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>NATO finished the exercise on schedule and went home. Only afterwards did Western intelligence work out what the other side had been doing. A subsequent report by the President&rsquo;s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, declassified decades later, did not mince words.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #d32f2f;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7\"><em>&ldquo;we may have inadvertently placed our relationship with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>President&rsquo;s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board<\/strong> &mdash; US intelligence review of the 1983 war scare, declassified 2015<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>The same review found the Soviet and Warsaw Pact reaction to be &ldquo;unprecedented&rdquo;, and described it as activity of a kind seen only during genuine crisis periods. Able Archer had come close to producing a war that neither side wanted, intended, or would have understood until it was under way.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mx0ZdQcELhc\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;border-radius:8px\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n<p style=\"font-size:14px;color:#666;text-align:center;margin-top:-8px\"><em>The war game that Moscow read as the real thing.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The Pattern<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>Look at the four together and something uncomfortable emerges. Only one of them, Cuba, was a deliberate confrontation between leaders who knew they were in a crisis. Korea was a commander pushing beyond his authority. Berlin was a passport check that escalated. Able Archer was a scheduled training exercise that one side could not tell apart from the real thing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>The systems built to prevent nuclear war &mdash; alert states, exercises, reconnaissance, early warning &mdash; are the same systems that generate the signals the other side reads as aggression. That is not a flaw anyone has solved. It is the structure of deterrence.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>And in the moments that mattered, what stopped it was not the system. It was Arkhipov in a submarine, and <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/stanislav-petrov-1983-nuclear-false-alarm\/\">Stanislav Petrov at a console in Serpukhov-15<\/a> a few weeks before Able Archer, deciding that his screens were wrong. Both men were doing the opposite of what their training told them to do, and both were right.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p><em>Sources: Wikipedia, National Security Archive, Atomic Heritage Foundation, US Army, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Smithsonian Magazine, Imperial War Museums, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background:#f0f4ff;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:16px 20px;margin:32px 0 8px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0\">\r\n<p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:600;color:#333\">More From the Nuclear Series<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/serie-de-catastrophes-nucleaires-evitees-de-justesse-pendant-la-guerre-froide\/\">Les nuits o\u00f9 le monde a failli s&#039;effondrer<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/stanislav-petrov-1983-nuclear-false-alarm\/\">La nuit o\u00f9 un homme a ignor\u00e9 les sir\u00e8nes<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">Le seul homme tu\u00e9 par des tirs ennemis lors de la crise des missiles de Cuba<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/goldsboro-1961-b52-broken-arrow-bombes-a-hydrogene\/\">Un seul interrupteur avant l&#039;apocalypse<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/palomares-1966-b-52-hydrogen-bombs-spain\/\">Palomares : Le jour o\u00f9 quatre bombes H sont tomb\u00e9es sur l&#039;Espagne<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/fr\/race-for-the-atomic-bomb-series\/\">La course \u00e0 la bombe : une s\u00e9rie Focus<\/a><\/p>\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Korea, Berlin, Cuba and Able Archer 83. Four times the Cold War nearly became a third world war, and the individuals who stopped it.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":16171132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[666,664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16172414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-and-legends","category-military-aviation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Four Times the Cold War Nearly Went Nuclear<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Korea, Berlin 1961, Cuba 1962 and Able Archer 83. 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