From a deadly computer glitch to the submarine crewman who persuaded his captain not to launch nukes, these are the chilling Cold War moments when we stared oblivion in the face
THE Cold War may be over, but global tensions are heating up as a result of Kim Jong-un's brinkmanship in North Korea.
As tiny tyrant Kim launches another provocative ballistic missile, we look back on the Cold War close calls which nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.
The NORAD computer glitch
The world was nearly destroyed in 1979 when a computer at NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) went on the blink.
On the morning of November 9, technicians at the nuclear defence base in Colorado were sent a chilling warning that the Soviets had launched a nuclear strike against America.
President Jimmy Carter's doomsday plane was prepped for take off, launch control was notified to prepare to fire off a nuclear salvo and the US Air Force scrambled 10 interceptor fighter planes.
But just before World War Three could really kick off, NORAD checked their satellite data and realised something was wrong.
Rather than the USSR launching a nuclear attack, a technician had mistakenly launched a training programme which simulated a Soviet strike.
It serves to this day as a chilling reminder of just how close the world has come to annihilation.
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The B-59 submarine incident
In 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world just seconds away from a nuclear midnight.
On October 27, American destroyer USS Beale was paroling the US blockade around Cuba.
The ship clocked a Soviet B-59 nuclear submarine lurking beneath the blockade, and dropped a series of unarmed depth charges as warning shots to the Soviet sub.
But the submarine captain failed to realise the charges were non-lethal, and ordered the ship's nuclear-tipped torpedo to be prepared for launch.
The mistake would have started World War Three, if only the submarine's launch protocol didn't need all commanding officers on-board the sub to sign off on it.
Vasili Arkhipov, B-59’s second in command, refused to agree to the strike and eventually talked his captain down.
Without Arkhipov's cool head on-board the sub, the strike would have escalated the Cold War to a full-blown nuclear showdown.
The nuclear false alarm
On September 26, 1983, a Soviet Colonel faced a choice which could have ended the world.
Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov was head honcho at Serpukhov-15, a Soviet nuclear detection bunker, when an alarm sounded that the US had fired five missiles towards Russia.
Petrov was under orders to report any alarm to Soviet high command, but he had a gut feeling that something was wrong.
He thought that any attack would consist of hundreds of warheads, rather than just a handful, and he knew that the warning system was prone to mistakes.
Petrov reported that the warning must have been a false alarm, and saved the world by ignoring the sirens blaring all around him.
When his story was declassified at the end of the Cold War, Petrov was honoured by the United Nations for saving us all from annihilation.
The war game that nearly led to the real thing
In November 1983, NATO conducted a military exercise which nearly triggered a real-life East vs West showdown.
The nuclear allies ran a drill called Able Archer 83, which simulated a full-on attack by the USSR and the NATO nuclear salvo which would follow.
But the drill was far more ambitious and serious than many other simulations, with the US changing its nuclear alert to the highest level and moving thousands of troops to Europe as part of the war game.
It even moved its military command to backup locations as part of the exercise.
To the USSR, this made the whole simulation look a lot like the real thing, and they assumed that NATO's talk of an ongoing war game was just a cover-up for a real attack.
The USSR prepared its fighters for takeoff and readied their nuclear arsenal, but the end of the NATO simulation on November 11 resulted in the Soviets standing down.
The spy plane that got lost
On the night of October 27, 1962, the world found itself on the brink of annihilation.
An American U-2 spy plane was scouting for dodgy activity around the North Pole when pilot Charles Maultsby flew into the glow of the northern lights.
Unable to navigate using the stars, the pilot drifted well off course and ended up in Soviet airspace, prompting the USSR to assume they were under attack.
The Soviets sent jets to shoot the plane down, whilst the Americans scrambled nuclear-armed fighters of their own to escort the lost U-2.
US president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev both knew how close the confrontation came to a nuclear war.
The next day, the two found a peaceful resolution to the ongoing Cuban Missile Crisis and temporarily diffused the Cold War.
These aren't the first chilling Cold War revelations to remind us just how much was hanging in the balance.
Earlier this year, we told how declassified documents revealed America and Russia’s bizarre plans to obliterate the Moon with nuclear weapons.
And we also revealed how the USSR planned to survive an all-out nuclear war with NATO and march its soldiers into the heart of a scorched Europe.