The Cuban Missile Crisis is the only situation in which the leaders of the two superpowers consciously contemplated a direct military confrontation that could escalate to all-out nuclear war.
Ukraine is a "Russian backyard", as Cuba is an "American backyard", but neither is Biden Kennedy, nor is Putin Khrushchev, and neither Zelensky resembles Castro at all. During the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago, the whole world was anxiously waiting to see if there would be a Third World, nuclear war. The danger was in the air and it was real. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in the memory. Many people had nightmares, dreaming of that characteristic mushroom. Today, for comparable geostrategic reasons, Washington and Moscow have played tricks on Ukraine, but not a single Russian or Western soldier will fire a gun at each other, let alone launch a missile with a nuclear warhead.
According to a new report by Chatham House, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there have been as many as thirteen, mostly secret, international incidents that have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
In the fall of 1962, the world watches helplessly as a Cold War nuclear poker game in which the chip equals one megaton of trinitrotoluene. The Soviet government is secretly building bases in Cuba and deploying missiles with nuclear warheads within range of Washington and half of the US strategic bomber bases. US President John F. Kennedy rejects military pressure to bomb Cuba immediately and orders a naval blockade. American bombers are in the air. Russian ships are approaching the blockade line of which they were not informed... Exactly half a century has passed since the thirteen-day Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when atomic Armageddon was narrowly avoided, the last battle before the end of the world
