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words • 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953: The Korean War[->0], a war between two factions trying to control the Korean Peninsula, a communist one supported by China and the USSR, and a capitalistic one, supported by the UN and the United States. Many people believed that it would escalate into a full on war between the three superpowers. CBS[->1] war correspondent Bill Downs[->2]believed that Korea would trigger a world war, writing in a 1951 See Magazine article that, "To my mind, the answer is: Yes, Korea is the beginning of World War III. The brilliant landings at Inchon[->3] and the cooperative efforts of the American armed forces with the United Nations Allies have won us a victory in Korea. But this is only the first battle in a major international struggle which now is engulfing the Far East and the entire world."[2] He repeated this belief on ABC Evening News[->4] while reporting on the USS Pueblo incident[->5] in 1968.[3]

• October 15–28, 1962: The Cuban missile crisis[->6], a confrontation on the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, is often considered as having been the closest to a nuclear exchange. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2[->7] was shot down over Cuba and another almost intercepted over Siberia, after Curtis LeMay[->8] (U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff[->9]) had neglected to enforce Presidential orders to suspend all overflights, and a Soviet submarine nearly launched a nuclear-tipped torpedo in response to depth charges (with the launch being prevented by an officer named Vasili Arkhipov[->10]).

• September 26, 1983: A false alarm[->11] occurred on the Soviet nuclear early warning system[->12], showing the launch of American Minuteman ICBMs from bases in the United States. The potential for an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its Western allies was prevented by Stanislav Petrov[->13], an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, who intuited the scale and recent system upgrades meant the system had...