{"id":4159474,"date":"2026-07-06T15:18:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T13:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/?p=4159474"},"modified":"2026-07-20T17:02:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T15:02:30","slug":"nuclear-near-disasters-cold-war-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/nuclear-near-disasters-cold-war-series\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nights the World Almost Ended"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style><\/p>\r\n<p>It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours, American depth charges have been going off around the hull \u2014 blow after blow, which the boat\u2019s radio-intercept officer would later compare to sitting inside a metal barrel while somebody pounds it with a sledgehammer.<\/p>\r\n<p>The submarine has heard nothing from Moscow in days. Her captain, Valentin Savitsky, cannot know that the charges are signals, not an attack \u2014 the message never reached him. By one crewman\u2019s account he is now shouting for his special weapon, the nuclear torpedo in the bow, to be made ready: if there is a war above, he will not die for nothing. In the crowded control room, a 36-year-old staff officer named Vasili Arkhipov \u2014 whose agreement the launch requires \u2014 quietly refuses.<\/p>\r\n<p>That refusal stayed secret for forty years. And it was not a freak event. Three times between 1962 and 1995 \u2014 twice at the height of the Cold War, once in supposed peacetime \u2014 the machinery built to warn of nuclear attack instead marched the world to the edge of one, and a single human judgment, exercised in minutes, walked it back. This series tells all three stories in full. This is the map.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background: #f5f5f5; border-radius: 8px; padding: 20px 24px; margin: 24px 0;\">\r\n<p style=\"margin: 0 0 10px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 17px;\">Quick Facts: Three Nights, One Pattern<\/p>\r\n<table style=\"border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.6;\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 12px 4px 0; font-weight: 600; white-space: nowrap; vertical-align: top;\">27 October 1962<\/td>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 0;\">Submarine B-59, depth-charged and cut off, nearly fires a nuclear torpedo; Vasili Arkhipov says no \u2014 on the same day a <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/aircraft\/u-2-dragon-lady\">U-2<\/a> is shot down over Cuba and another strays into Soviet Siberia<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 12px 4px 0; font-weight: 600; white-space: nowrap; vertical-align: top;\">26 September 1983<\/td>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 0;\">Soviet satellites report five US ICBMs inbound; Lt Col Stanislav Petrov calls it a malfunction \u2014 correctly<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 12px 4px 0; font-weight: 600; white-space: nowrap; vertical-align: top;\">25 January 1995<\/td>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 0;\">A Norwegian science rocket is read as a Trident missile; Boris Yeltsin\u2019s nuclear briefcase is activated \u2014 the only known time<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 12px 4px 0; font-weight: 600; white-space: nowrap; vertical-align: top;\">The pattern<\/td>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 0;\">Fallible sensors, impossibly short decision windows, and one person in the loop<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 12px 4px 0; font-weight: 600; white-space: nowrap; vertical-align: top;\">The aviation thread<\/td>\r\n<td style=\"padding: 4px 0;\">Spy planes, bombers on alert, and rockets mistaken for missiles run through every incident<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">The Pattern Nobody Designed<\/h2>\r\n<p>Every nuclear near-miss in this series has the same three ingredients, and none of them is malice. First, a sensor tells a story that happens to be false \u2014 a radar reads a science rocket as a Trident, a satellite reads sunlight on clouds as five rising boosters, a submarine crew reads signalling charges as an attack. Second, the clock: the machinery of deterrence allots minutes, sometimes single-digit minutes, to decide whether the story is true. Third \u2014 and this is the unsettling part \u2014 the final safeguard turns out to be not a system but a person, who must choose to distrust the very tools built to inform him.<\/p>\r\n<p>The Cold War produced dozens of lesser false alarms; these are the three where the chain ran furthest towards the end. Looked at together, they read less like three lucky escapes than like one recurring failure mode, dressed in different decades.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; margin: 24px 0;\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0; border-radius: 8px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0lP_ICJo_Jg\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-no-lazy=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n<p>Take them in order \u2014 from the deep water off Cuba, to a concrete bunker south of Moscow, to a snow-covered launch pad in Arctic Norway.<\/p>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">1962: Black Saturday<\/h2>\r\n<p>The worst single day of the Cuban Missile Crisis packed three separate near-misses into 24 hours. Over Cuba, a surface-to-air missile killed U-2 pilot Rudolf Anderson \u2014 the crisis\u2019s only combat death, and very nearly the trigger for a full American strike. Over the Arctic, another U-2, its pilot blinded by the aurora on a routine sampling flight, wandered deep into Soviet airspace with MiGs climbing after it and nuclear-armed American F-102 interceptors scrambling to meet it.<\/p>\r\n<p>And beneath the Sargasso Sea, B-59\u2019s exhausted captain called for his nuclear torpedo. The US Navy ships above did not learn what had nearly hit them until a Havana conference in 2002, when Russian veterans and declassified records finally told the story \u2014 and the director of the US National Security Archive concluded, simply, that a man called Arkhipov had saved the world.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin: 0 0 24px;\"><img data-opt-id=1830742939  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; border-radius: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:0e0_.b970\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/07\/FEATURED-soviet-submarine-b59-surfaced-cuba-1962.jpg\" alt=\"Soviet submarine B-59 on the surface near Cuba with a US Navy helicopter overhead, October 1962\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" \/>\r\n<figcaption style=\"font-size: 13px; color: #777; text-align: center; margin-top: 6px; font-style: italic;\">B-59 on the surface, a US Navy helicopter overhead, October 1962. Inside, minutes earlier, three officers had argued over a nuclear torpedo. US Navy photo, public domain.<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n<p>Kennedy\u2019s advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. needed no hindsight to rank the day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background: #f8f9fa; border-left: 4px solid #5C91FF; padding: 20px 22px; margin: 18px 0 24px; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7;\"><em>\u201cThis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history.\u201d<\/em>\r\n<div style=\"margin-top: 10px; font-size: 14px; color: #555;\"><strong>Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.<\/strong> \u2014 historian and Kennedy advisor<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p style=\"background: #eef3ff; border-left: 4px solid #5C91FF; padding: 14px 18px; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-size: 17px; font-weight: bold; margin: 6px 0 30px;\">Read the full story: <a style=\"color: #2b5fd9;\" href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/black-saturday-1962-b59-arkhipov-maultsby\/\">Black Saturday: Three Near-Misses in One Day<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">1983: The Night One Man Ignored the Sirens<\/h2>\r\n<p>Twenty-one years later the danger had moved indoors, into a bunker called Serpukhov-15, where the Soviet Union\u2019s new Oko satellites watched America\u2019s missile fields. Just past midnight on 26 September 1983, the sirens howled and a red screen lit up with the word LAUNCH: one Minuteman ICBM rising from Montana, then five, with the system reporting its own confidence as maximum.<\/p>\r\n<p>The duty officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, had perhaps a quarter of an hour of usable time, a brand-new system he did not fully trust, and ground radars that saw nothing. He reported a malfunction \u2014 then sat for 23 minutes, feeling, as he put it, like a man on a hot frying pan, waiting to find out if he had just gambled away his country. He had not: the satellites had mistaken sunlight glinting off high clouds for booster plumes.<\/p>\r\n<p>His reasoning was pure engineer \u2014 and one line of it has outlived him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background: #f8f9fa; border-left: 4px solid #5C91FF; padding: 20px 22px; margin: 18px 0 24px; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7;\"><em>\u201cWhen people start a war, they don\u2019t start it with only five missiles.\u201d<\/em>\r\n<div style=\"margin-top: 10px; font-size: 14px; color: #555;\"><strong>Stanislav Petrov<\/strong> \u2014 to the Washington Post, 1999<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n<p>The timing made the call heavier still. Three weeks earlier, Soviet air defence had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing 269 people; six weeks later, NATO\u2019s Able Archer exercise would rattle Moscow\u2019s nerves again. Into that autumn of paranoia, a formal report of five inbound ICBMs might not have been treated as a technical curiosity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; margin: 24px 0;\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0; border-radius: 8px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9s5oGYZi3QM\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-no-lazy=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p style=\"background: #eef3ff; border-left: 4px solid #5C91FF; padding: 14px 18px; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-size: 17px; font-weight: bold; margin: 6px 0 30px;\">Read the full story: <a style=\"color: #2b5fd9;\" href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/stanislav-petrov-1983-nuclear-false-alarm\/\">The Night One Man Ignored the Sirens<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">1995: The Rocket From And\u00f8ya<\/h2>\r\n<p>The strangest entry on the list happened after the Cold War was over. On 25 January 1995, Norwegian and American scientists launched a four-stage Black Brant XII from And\u00f8ya to study the northern lights. On Russian radar, the biggest rocket the range had ever flown looked like a Trident missile climbing out of the Norwegian Sea \u2014 and a lone Trident fitted the nightmare scenario of a high-altitude EMP burst meant to blind Russia\u2019s defences ahead of a real attack.<\/p>\r\n<p>For the only time in the nuclear age, as far as public record goes, a head of state\u2019s nuclear briefcase was activated in response to a live warning. Boris Yeltsin was connected with his defence minister and chief of the General Staff while the track was watched; most of the ten-minute window was gone before the trajectory bent harmlessly towards Svalbard. Yeltsin confirmed it himself to reporters the next day \u2014 he had used his \u201clittle black case\u201d for the first time.<\/p>\r\n<p>The cause was neither hardware nor hostility. Norway had notified Russia in writing a month in advance; the letter simply never reached the radar crews. The most dangerous minutes of the post-Cold-War era came down to an unforwarded piece of paper.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p style=\"background: #eef3ff; border-left: 4px solid #5C91FF; padding: 14px 18px; border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0; font-size: 17px; font-weight: bold; margin: 6px 0 30px;\">Read the full story: <a style=\"color: #2b5fd9;\" href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/norwegian-rocket-incident-1995-yeltsin-cheget\/\">The Science Rocket That Opened the Nuclear Briefcase<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">And the Pilot Who Never Came Home<\/h2>\r\n<p>One thread of Black Saturday deserves \u2014 and today receives \u2014 its own telling. Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. was the man in the U-2 over eastern Cuba, photographing the missile sites the whole crisis revolved around, when an SA-2 burst beside his aircraft at 72,000 feet. He was the only person killed by enemy fire in the entire thirteen days \u2014 and his death, absorbed rather than avenged by Kennedy, may paradoxically have helped end the crisis rather than escalate it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin: 0 0 24px;\"><img data-opt-id=1957008135  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; border-radius: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:0e0_.b970\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/07\/lockheed-u2-dragon-lady-takeoff.jpg\" alt=\"Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady reconnaissance aircraft climbing after takeoff\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" \/>\r\n<figcaption style=\"font-size: 13px; color: #777; text-align: center; margin-top: 6px; font-style: italic;\">The U-2: the aircraft that found the missiles in Cuba, lost Rudolf Anderson to one, and carried Chuck Maultsby into Siberia \u2014 all in the same October. US Air Force photo.<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">The shootdown of Rudolf Anderson \u2014 the full story of Black Saturday\u2019s only casualty \u2014 is here.<\/a><\/p>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 22px;\">Why It Was Always About Aircraft<\/h2>\r\n<p>Run a finger along all three stories and you keep touching wings. It was a spy plane\u2019s photographs that started the Cuban crisis and a spy plane\u2019s wanderings that nearly widened it; nuclear-armed interceptors that rose to meet a lost pilot; bombers holding at their failsafe points that gave every miscalculation its weight. In 1983, the satellites that cried wolf existed to watch for missiles that had made the bomber\u2019s job of warning obsolete \u2014 and compressed the world\u2019s decision time from hours to minutes in the process. In 1995, the object at the centre of it all was itself a flying machine, a research rocket whose only crime was resembling a military one.<\/p>\r\n<p>Aviation built the nuclear age \u2014 delivered its first weapons, carried its cameras, flew its bluffs \u2014 and aviation\u2019s hardest lesson applies to it exactly: the system is never the whole story. Checklists, sensors and automation fail, quietly and confidently, and when they do, everything narrows to a human being with partial information and no time. An exhausted staff officer in a sweltering submarine. An engineer distrusting his own screens. Radar crews watching a track bend away with two minutes to spare.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; margin: 24px 0;\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: 0; border-radius: 8px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8dIUpY4rlJ0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-no-lazy=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\r\n<p>Three nights, three decades, one margin: somebody, at the worst possible moment, chose to wait. The full stories \u2014 told in this series \u2014 are worth your time, because the pattern they describe has not retired. The sensors are better now. The minutes are just as short.<\/p>\r\n<p><em>Sources: National Security Archive; BBC; Washington Post; Nuclear Museum \/ Atomic Heritage Foundation; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight; Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare; Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\r\n<!-- mf-faq -->\r\n\r\n\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-block\"><style>.mf-faq-block{margin:34px 0}.mf-faq-item:not([open]) .mf-faq-answer{display:none !important}.mf-faq-block h2.mf-faq-h{padding-top:22px;margin-bottom:14px}.mf-faq-item{border:1px solid #e2e8f5;border-radius:8px;margin:0 0 10px;background:#fff}.mf-faq-item summary{list-style:none;cursor:pointer;padding:15px 50px 15px 18px;font-weight:600;color:#1a1a1a;position:relative;line-height:1.45;user-select:none}.mf-faq-item summary::-webkit-details-marker{display:none}.mf-faq-item summary::after{content:\"+\";position:absolute;right:18px;top:50%;transform:translateY(-50%);font-size:1.5em;font-weight:400;color:#5C91FF;line-height:1}.mf-faq-item[open] summary::after{content:\"\\2013\"}.mf-faq-item[open] summary{border-bottom:1px solid #eef1f8}.mf-faq-item summary:hover{background:#f5f8ff}.mf-faq-answer{padding:14px 18px;color:#333;line-height:1.6}.mf-faq-answer p{margin:0}.mf-faq-answer a{color:#5C91FF}<\/style>\r\n<h2 class=\"mf-faq-h\">Related Questions<\/h2>\r\n<details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>What were the worst nuclear near-misses of the Cold War?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>Among the worst Cold War nuclear near-misses were three incidents: in 1962 Soviet submarine B-59 nearly fired a nuclear torpedo; in 1983 a Soviet early-warning system falsely reported US missiles inbound; and in 1995 a Norwegian science rocket was briefly mistaken for a submarine-launched missile. Each brought the world dangerously close to accidental nuclear war.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>Who was Vasili Arkhipov?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer aboard submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. When the depth-charged, overheating sub lost contact with Moscow and its captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo, Arkhipov refused to give his required consent. His veto is widely credited with preventing a nuclear exchange during that <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">perilous crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>Who was Stanislav Petrov?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel who, on 26 September 1983, was on duty when satellites reported five US intercontinental missiles heading for the Soviet Union. Judging that a real attack would involve far more missiles, Petrov correctly dismissed it as a malfunction rather than reporting a launch, likely averting a catastrophic retaliatory strike.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>What was the Norwegian rocket incident?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>The Norwegian rocket incident occurred on 25 January 1995, when a scientific rocket launched to study the aurora was briefly read by Russian radar as a possible Trident missile. Russian nuclear forces went on alert and President Boris Yeltsin's nuclear briefcase was activated, the only known time that has happened, before the rocket was identified as harmless.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>Did a Soviet submarine almost launch a nuclear torpedo?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>Yes. On 27 October 1962, Soviet submarine B-59, depth-charged by US ships and cut off from Moscow in stifling heat, came close to firing its nuclear torpedo. The captain believed war might already have started. Officer Vasili Arkhipov withheld his consent, and the torpedo was never launched, on the same day a <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">U-2 was shot down<\/a> over Cuba.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><details class=\"mf-faq-item\">\r\n<summary>What causes nuclear false alarms?<\/summary>\r\n<div class=\"mf-faq-answer\">\r\n<p>Nuclear false alarms typically arise from the same three ingredients: fallible sensors that tell a frightening story, impossibly short decision windows, and heavy reliance on one person's judgement. Spy planes, bombers on alert and rockets mistaken for missiles recur throughout these incidents, including the <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/goldsboro-1961-b52-broken-arrow-hydrogen-bombs\/\">Goldsboro Broken Arrow<\/a> bomber accident of 1961.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/details><\/div>\r\n<p><script type=\"application\/ld+json\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@type\":\"FAQPage\",\"mainEntity\":[{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"What were the worst nuclear near-misses of the Cold War?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Among the worst Cold War nuclear near-misses were three incidents: in 1962 Soviet submarine B-59 nearly fired a nuclear torpedo; in 1983 a Soviet early-warning system falsely reported US missiles inbound; and in 1995 a Norwegian science rocket was briefly mistaken for a submarine-launched missile. Each brought the world dangerously close to accidental nuclear war.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Who was Vasili Arkhipov?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Vasili Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer aboard submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. When the depth-charged, overheating sub lost contact with Moscow and its captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo, Arkhipov refused to give his required consent. His veto is widely credited with preventing a nuclear exchange during that <a href=\\\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\\\">perilous crisis<\/a>.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Who was Stanislav Petrov?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel who, on 26 September 1983, was on duty when satellites reported five US intercontinental missiles heading for the Soviet Union. Judging that a real attack would involve far more missiles, Petrov correctly dismissed it as a malfunction rather than reporting a launch, likely averting a catastrophic retaliatory strike.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"What was the Norwegian rocket incident?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"The Norwegian rocket incident occurred on 25 January 1995, when a scientific rocket launched to study the aurora was briefly read by Russian radar as a possible Trident missile. Russian nuclear forces went on alert and President Boris Yeltsin's nuclear briefcase was activated, the only known time that has happened, before the rocket was identified as harmless.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Did a Soviet submarine almost launch a nuclear torpedo?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Yes. On 27 October 1962, Soviet submarine B-59, depth-charged by US ships and cut off from Moscow in stifling heat, came close to firing its nuclear torpedo. The captain believed war might already have started. Officer Vasili Arkhipov withheld his consent, and the torpedo was never launched, on the same day a <a href=\\\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\\\">U-2 was shot down<\/a> over Cuba.\"}},{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"What causes nuclear false alarms?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Nuclear false alarms typically arise from the same three ingredients: fallible sensors that tell a frightening story, impossibly short decision windows, and heavy reliance on one person's judgement. Spy planes, bombers on alert and rockets mistaken for missiles recur throughout these incidents, including the <a href=\\\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/goldsboro-1961-b52-broken-arrow-hydrogen-bombs\/\\\">Goldsboro Broken Arrow<\/a> bomber accident of 1961.\"}}]}<\/script><!-- \/mf-faq -->\r\n\r\n\r\n<div style=\"background: #f5f5f5; border-radius: 8px; padding: 20px 24px; margin: 28px 0 8px;\">\r\n<p style=\"margin: 0 0 10px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 17px;\">Related Posts<\/p>\r\n<ul style=\"margin: 0; padding-left: 20px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.8;\">\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/black-saturday-1962-b59-arkhipov-maultsby\/\">Black Saturday: Three Near-Misses in One Day<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/stanislav-petrov-1983-nuclear-false-alarm\/\">The Night One Man Ignored the Sirens<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/norwegian-rocket-incident-1995-yeltsin-cheget\/\">The Science Rocket That Opened the Nuclear Briefcase<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/rudolf-anderson-u2-shootdown-cuban-missile-crisis\/\">The Shootdown of Rudolf Anderson<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/shot-down-over-the-urals-the-u-2-spy-plane-incident\/\">Shot Down Over the Urals: The U-2 Spy Plane Incident<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/b-52-stratofortress-70-years-new-engines-rolls-royce-f130-b-52j-100-years\/\">The B-52 at 70<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours, American depth charges have been going off around the hull \u2014 blow [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":4158170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[666,664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4159474","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 v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Nuclear Near-Disasters of the Cold War<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A series on the nuclear near-disasters of the Cold War, the accidents and false alarms that nearly triggered Armageddon by mistake.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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