Close Calls: When the Cold War Almost Went Nuclear

People born after the Cold War don’t know what they missed when it came to close calls with nuclear war. Many people who lived through those years also don’t know, since little was revealed at the time about dozens of events that might have triggered a nuclear exchange. Many were kept secret then. Some are still classified now.

Arms control expert Milton Leitenberg catalogues the accidents, overactive military exercises, false alarms, alert failures, false identifications (a burning oil well could trigger warning of a missile launch), aggressive posturing, and aggressive actions—shooting down planes, ramming ships—that made up the boiling point of a conflict called “cold” because it never boiled over. He soberly notes, “it is probably rather remarkable that no more serious US–Soviet engagements ever took place.” The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) is the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war. At that point, the US had a 17:1 nuclear weapon superiority over the USSR. There remains an information superiority over the Soviets: we know more about what the US did than what the Soviets did. For instance, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations threatened nuclear response to non-nuclear aggression; the US warhead-rattling over the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was one of the reasons Khrushchev stationed missiles in Cuba. The Johnson administration planned for the use of tactical nuclear weapons—weapons designed to be used on the battlefield—in Vietnam. The Nixon administration tried to position the President as a “mad bomber” willing to go nuclear over Vietnam for negotiation purposes. (Spoiler: it didn’t work.)

Tactical nuclear weapons included multiple types of bombs and missiles as well as “artillery, depth charges, torpedoes and rocket torpedoes, atomic demolition munitions, nuclear landmines and ocean mines,” writes Leitenberg. The variety, and through the Sixties, extraordinary mobility of these weapons, increased the likelihood of accidents. Accidents raised two linked questions: could a nuclear weapon mishap trigger a nuclear detonation, and could that detonation precipitate a larger US–Soviet nuclear exchange?

The US designated “major” nuclear weapons system accidents Broken Arrow incidents—there were thirty of these noted in a 1980 report, but Leitenberg thinks there were many more. This report doesn’t, for instance, include nine major Strategic Air Command aircraft accidents. Only one of the military services ever reported “minor” Bent Spear incidents: the US Navy reported 266 from 1965 to 1985, while a component of the Navy, the Pacific Fleet, reported 379 between 1965 and 1977. The Navy also reported forty-two collisions involving US nuclear-equipped submarines between 1983 and 1989.

After some hairy incidents, including the near nuclear detonation of a bomb jettisoned by a crashing US bomber crew over Goldsboro, Georgia, in 1958, both countries made it harder for nuclear weapons to detonate accidentally.

The Soviet Union also suffered “large numbers of ‘major’ accidents,” but the secretive state was always reluctant to let such information out.

Between 1977 and 1985, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) had over 20,000 first-stage conferences over potential missile launch alerts. Some 1,152 went to the second stage “to evaluate possible threats” and six of these went to the third and final state of threat assessment. After the break-up the USSR, high officials there could admit that “malfunctions of [early warming] systems were not rare.”

For many years, it was wrongly claimed that the USSR never “initiated a strategic nuclear alert.” But they did: for instance, in 1960, 1962, 1968, 1973, and 1982.

The US used a five-level Defense Readiness Conditions system (DEFCON), with 5 being normal peacetime conditions and 1 being maximum alert/general war. There were three DEFCON 3s, meaning advanced alert/war possible: one after the end of the Arab–Israeli war (1973); one in 1976 over an incident on the DMZ between the Koreas; and one, post-Cold War, after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Only twice has the US reached DEFCON 2, meaning full alert/war imminent. The first DEFCON 2 was in May 1960 during a test of the military alert system; it was blamed on an overeager official and quickly terminated. The second DEFCON 2 was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There were additional instances when US nuclear forces went on alert, but their details are still classified. Meaning there are yet cases where we all don’t know what we—and the planet—missed.

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