The five instances the world was (accidentally) on the brink of nuclear destruction

There are five times in history when the world nearly ended in nuclear war. Photo / Getty Images

There is a common misconception that the incredibly powerful - and potentially maladjusted - leaders of nuclear-armed states have access to a “red button” that can unleash Armageddon.

After all, it’s all in a day’s work for Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong-un to threaten global nuclear destruction should any foreign administration impede their actions or criticise their behaviour.

But we should perhaps take some comfort in knowing that the “red button” perched on the Resolute Desk during President Trump’s tenure was merely a device to signal that he required a Diet Coke - brought to him promptly on a silver platter by an aide.

Alarmingly, it is human error, not mad dictators, that account for the terrifying near misses of the last few decades.

The news this week is a case in point: a Russian pilot in a SU-27 fighter jet reportedly fired two missiles at an RAF surveillance plane over the Black Sea last September, after interpreting an ambiguous order from his commanders as permission to fire.

The first missile missed and the second - yes, there were two attempts - fell off the wing, indicating a malfunction or an aborted launch.

Had the missiles met their intended target and the 30 military personnel carried inside, the consequences could have been unspeakably bleak.

In fact, the instances where we have been but a whisker from global destruction are almost comically pedestrian.

An officer arriving at the base by car realised that the assailant had four legs and was, in truth, a bear. Photo / Getty Images

The Black Bear Incident (1962)

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, both US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were poised to launch an apocalyptic nuclear attack at a moment’s notice.

Tensions were naturally high, so around midnight on October 25, 1962, staff at the Duluth Sector Direction Centre in Minnesota were appalled to see a Soviet intruder aggressively ascend the security fence.

A US Air Force guard fired at the assailant and the shots triggered the air base’s alarms. Pilots scrambled to their aircrafts and a legion of fighter jets were assembled, each filled with four missiles and a single devastating 360-kilo nuclear missile rocket.

Just minutes before the jets were launched, an officer arriving at the base by car realised that the assailant had four legs and was, in truth, a bear. He managed to call off the attack by frantically flashing his car’s headlights.

The Norad Incident (1979)

At 4am on a dark November morning, US diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski got a call that no National Security Advisor ever wants to receive.

His military aide, General William Odom, was ringing to inform him that 2,200 missiles had been launched from Soviet submarines in an attack that would incinerate Washington.

Just as Brzezinski was poised to ring President Carter and break the horrific news, the phone rang out again. It was Odom. And he was most terribly sorry.

The whole thing was a big misunderstanding - Norad (the North American Aerospace Defence Command) had confirmed it was a false alarm, with a later investigation confirming that a faulty computer chip had triggered the alert.

Former Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov was credited with preventing nuclear destruction. Photo / Getty Images

Soviet nuclear alarm incident (1983)

Shortly after midnight in September 1983, America fired five intercontinental ballistic missiles on to Soviet soil. Or so thought Oko, the Russian nuclear warning system. Alarms flashed up accordingly.

On duty that night overseeing the system was Stanislav Petrov, an engineer with the Soviet Air Defence Forces, who thought it must be a false alarm and waited against orders - Soviet strategy at the time was immediate and compulsory retaliation - for corroborating evidence.

Sure enough, but only after no missile landed, was he proved correct. The early warning system had malfunctioned and such was the embarrassment of the Soviet administration that not much was said about it again until 1998, when the commander of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, General Yuri Votintsev, published his memoirs.

Petrov, who died in 2017, was later credited with “saving the world”.

The Black Brant scare (1995)

It’s probably wise, if you are going to conduct a science experiment near the Russian border, that you don’t make your research rockets look like US Navy trident missiles.

Still, hindsight is a beautiful thing - a sentiment no doubt keenly felt by a group of Norwegian scientists, who on January 25, 1995, decided to send up their rocket to investigate the Northern Lights of Svalbard.

Russian alarm systems identified the launch as a nuclear attack. Almost immediately, President Boris Yeltsin was notified and presented with his black nuclear-command suitcase. After five unbearably-tense minutes of deliberation with his defence minister, it became clear that the rocket would land beyond Russian territory, and the retaliatory nuclear attack was called off.

It was later revealed that the Russian government had been notified weeks prior to the research launch, but the country’s radar crew hadn’t been included in the memo.