The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
The Soviet move followed the deployment of American ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey.
The US president John F. Kennedy responded with a military blockade of Cuba and placed US strategic forces on maximum alert dubbed DEFCON 2, the level preceding full-out nuclear war.
B-52 bombers were on continuous airborne patrol and dozens of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were on ready alert.
Soviet ships laden with nuclear missiles turned back in exchange for a secret agreement by Washington to remove its missiles from Turkey.
Washington also promised not to invade Cuba.
The crisis prompted the BAS to move its “Doomsday Clock” to two minutes before midnight, the closest the world has ever been to global nuclear catastrophe in its estimation.
Four decades later India and Pakistan came to the brink of nuclear war as their decades-old dispute over Kashmir reached fever pitch, with nearly a million soldiers massed on either side of the territory’s disputed border.
Both became a nuclear power in 1998.
After Pakistan’s then president Pervez Musharraf said he was prepared to resort to nuclear weapons against India, India’s defence minister told the International Herald Tribune that “he should realise that India can survive a nuclear attack, but Pakistan cannot.”
The two sides began a series of tit-for-tat missile tests before agreeing, under US pressure, to de-escalate tensions.
They reached a ceasefire in November 2003 and started a dialogue the following January.
International relations expert Daniel Vernet, former editor-in-chief of the influential French daily Le Monde, said the crisis involving North Korea illustrates the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
“Dissuasion worked as long as there were few actors and they were considered rational,” he said in a recent op-ed. “Their proliferation increases the possibility for misunderstandings, false interpretations of another’s intentions, or unbalanced judgement in autocratic regimes.”
The BAS set its Doomsday Clock to two and a half minutes to midnight in January this year partly as a result of a Trump’s “comments over North Korea, Russia and nuclear weapons.”
