The Day The World Almost Ends
The day was October 27, 1962. The Cold War was at a boiling point and about to go hot. An American U-2 was flying above the small island of Cuba in the morning and got shot down because the Cuban army thought it was a plane scouting for bombing locations for an invasion that they feared would come from Florida but actually the U-2 was a surveillance and reconnaissance plane that flied at high altitudes and was capable of operating in all weathers. The plane was capable of gathering a huge variety of imagery from multi-spectral images to infra-red that could be sent to ground data exploration centers.
While this was happening, the Kremlin and the White House were packing heat, ready to press the button, when somehow thanks to the aurora borealis interference in the sky of the north pole an American pilot got lost and entered Soviet air space for more than 90 minutes, almost causing a total nuclear war but thanks to the cool head of many of the world leaders in both the White House and the Kremlin, the bombs didn't go off, but the day was not over yet.
After hours of tension and almost destroying the world multiple times during that day, the Kremlin and the White house reached an agreement, the Soviet Union would remove the missiles from Cuba if the USA swore to never invade cuba again (and in the down low, not made public until later the USA also agreed to remove missiles it had stationed in Turkey). After this mess a "hotline" between the Kremlin and the White House was established so that this sort of miscommunication would never happen. The hotline remained active until the fall of the Soviets in 1992. Imagene how the world would be if the nukes where sent out that day, maybe we wouldn't even be here reading and browsing steemit... we may have ended up in a fallout kind of world or even worse, maybe the planet would not have been able to stand the nuclear power of boths nations and it would have just died slowly, destroying the human race with it.
Thanks for reading this far down! I hope you enjoyed the read :-D, Help me improve by leaving a comment with suggestions and if you liked it please upvote, reesteem and follow me for more in the future! Here's a list of my other posts if you feel like checking them out!
Come hang out with us at the Crypto Empire Community!
- The images in this article where sourced from Pixabay, a royalty free image source!
This reminds me of Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved humanity from a nuclear war. Is this related to the same event?
By the way, nice separator, very creative; it fits the article!
No, this was a different almost world ending event that happened in 1983 :-P
I like creating custom separators for my post!
I was also about to ask if it was the same accident when Stanislav chose not to report to higher-ups based on the hunch :) I guess all out nuclear war was avoided many times so far :D
I read this week Russia has tested successfully a missile that can go to mach 7 and can carry a nuclear warhead.
I read these news earlier this week too, one of the things that got me pumped for writing a little thing about the end of the world.
@minnowfairy has given a 17.86% upvote on your post.
This post has received a 3.18 % upvote from @boomerang.
The world ends for 800,000 obese people in the usa each year as they die with this fate listed on their death certificates. These are the people I work to help every day.
I'm coming to you from @kyrptonia with the same user name :)
Luna, I think you love history the same as me. Since you are interested in this topic, let me suggest you a listen. I am a huge Dan Carlin fan, listen to this podcast and you will get all the details you want on the Cuban Missile crisis. It's just awesome.
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/
Kryptonia: deathly_horror. Compelling story - scary stuff.