This Cracked article suggests that there were several instances throughout the Cold War (and one after) in which the USA and Soviet Union came extraordinarily close to unleashing nuclear weapons on each other. Given that this is an article on a comedy site, I was wondering if someone here could vet the information.
I'm not looking for a point by point confirmation or refutation (although that would be awesome), just whether or not these situations are blown out of proportion.
It may be a little naive of me to think this, but I can't imagine these two superpowers allowing there to be so much potential for single points of failure in terms of command and control of their nuclear arsenals, which seems to be the case in most of these examples. Then again, the possession of so much destructive power was unprecedented...so I guess I can see how things could fall through the cracks.
The stories in the article are accurate, and it arguably does not even include the closest time the US and USSR came to a nuclear exchange.
During Reagan's first term he launched what Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin termed "an uncompromising ideological offensive," as Reagan declared the Soviets an "evil empire" when addressing evangelicals in Florida and told the British Parliament that communism would fall on the "ash-heap of history." This combined with a massive increase in military spending left many in the Soviet Union nervous that Reagan meant his strategy of a "crusade for freedom" literally and that the US would attack.
In 1983, amid even more heightened tensions resulting from the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 NATO launched its annual joint training exercise. Termed "Able Archer" it was larger than normal and left the Soviets worried that the exercise was a mask for invasion. During the operation a Soviet early warning system indicated that the US had launched a nuclear missile towards the USSR. The operator, recognizing his systems tendency to fail and knowing that a first strike would be much larger, opted not to act immediately and waited for ground radar to confirm. When radar sites confirmed there was no launch the situation deescalated. It is reasonable to think that if the Soviet officer followed procedure then given the geo-political tension the Soviets would have launched. The officer in question was actually fired for as the Soviet did not want to admit their system had significant flaws. There is a documentary on him called The Man Who Saved the World also if you want to read more on it, the National Security Archive has a great collection of declassified documents that shows just how close the powers came to nuclear war.