From Wikipedia.org's article on World War III (hypothetical):
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, an
apocalyptic war between the United States and USSR was considered likely. The
Cuban missile crisis in 1962 is generally thought to be the historical point at which the risk of World War III was closest. Other potential starts have included the following (see
External links below for further examples):
- July 26th, 1956 – March, 1957 — Suez Crisis: the conflict pitted Egypt against an alliance between the French Fourth Republic, the United Kingdom and Israel. The USSR threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt, Canadian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lester B. Pearson feared a larger war and persuaded the British and French to withdraw.
- October 27, 1962; Cuban Missle Crisis: the conflict pitted The United States against an alliance between the USSR and Cuba. The USSR was attempting to place several launch sites in Cuba in response to The United States installation of missiles in Turkey. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 (piloted by Rudolph Anderson) was shot down over Cuba and another U-2 flight over Russia was almost intercepted when it strayed over Siberia, after Curtis LeMay (U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff) had neglected to enforce Presidential orders to suspend all overflights. An October 2002 dignitaries "reunion" with Castro in Cuba released classified documents which demonstrated that what McNamara referred to as 'rational men' (Castro and Khruschev) were perfectly willing to start a nuclear war over the crisis. Furthermore, it was revealed at this conference that an officer aboard a Soviet submarine, named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, may have single-handedly prevented the initiation of a nuclear catastrophe.
- October 24, 1973 — As the Yom Kippur War was winding down, a Soviet threat to intervene on Egypt's behalf caused the United States to go to DEFCON 3.
- November 9, 1979, when the US made emergency retaliation preparations after NORAD saw on-screen indications that a full-scale Soviet attack had been launched. No attempt was made to use the "red telephone" hotline to clarify the situation with the USSR and it was not until early-warning radar systems confirmed no such launch had taken place that NORAD realised that a computer system test had caused the display errors. A Senator inside the NORAD facility at the time described an atmosphere of absolute panic. A GAO investigation led to the construction of an off-site test facility, to prevent similar mistakes subsequently.
- September 26, 1983, when Soviet early warning system showed that a US ICBM attack had been launched. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, in command of the monitoring facility put the warning down to computer error and did not notify his superiors, who would have most likely launched a counter-attack.
- November 1983: Exercise Able Archer 83 — The USSR mistook a test of NATO's nuclear-release procedures as a fake cover for a NATO attack and subsequently raised its nuclear alert level. It was not until afterwards that the US realized how close it had come to nuclear war. At the time of the exercise the Soviet Politburo was without a healthy functioning head due to the failing health of then leader Yuri Andropov, which is thought to have been one of the contributing factors to the Soviet paranoia over the exercise.
- January 25, 1995 (see Norwegian Rocket Incident), when Russia almost launched a nuclear attack after a Norwegian missile launch for scientific research was detected from Spitsbergen and thought to be an attack on Russia, launched five minutes from Moscow. Norway had notified the world that it would be making the launch, but the Russian Defense Ministry had neglected to notify those monitoring Russia's nuclear defense systems.
In addition to the above there are two other points during the Cold War that may have resulted in world war. These, however, are not generally listed as they do not relate to the United States-Soviet Union rivalry, but rather the events following the
Sino-Soviet Split of 1960. The ideological split between Maoist communists (represented primarily by China) and Stalinist communists (represented primarily by the Soviet Union) divided the entire communist movement worldwide — which controlled governments or significant rebel factions on most continents. Thus a war between China and the Soviet Union may well have resulted in world war, whilst not necessarily involving the U.S. and the capitalist west (although the U.S. may have opportunistically intervened whilst its two communist rivals were distracted by war with each other). The two points the communist powers almost entered into all-out war were:
- March 1969, when border clashes broke out between Soviet and Chinese troops over Zhen Bao Island in the Ussuri River. In total, the Soviets suffered about 90 casualties to 800 for the Chinese (these numbers are based on Soviet claims). At the time there were almost one and a half million troops deployed along the border.
- 1978 and 1979, in which the pro-Soviet Vietnam invaded the pro-China Cambodia and removed Pol Pot. China in turn invaded Vietnam in retaliation and the Soviets denounced this action strongly, although it fell short of taking action. The next year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Chinese claimed this was a continuation of a strategy of encircling China with Soviet allies that had begun the previous year with the invasion of Cambodia.