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The U2 Spy Plane image of Soviet missiles in Cuba |
The phrase "one minute to midnight" is thrown around a lot when people talk about the Cuban missile crisis. It is a reference to the Doomsday Clock, a index published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by the University of Chicago that measures how close the world is to all-out nuclear war (midnight). The Cuban missile crisis certainly brought the world close to nuclear war, but neither the United States nor the USSR wanted to engage in a nuclear world war over the island nation of Cuba.
So, contrary to popular belief, the clock remained at 7 minutes to midnight during the entire Cuban missile affair. The clock has never landed on one minute to midnight, in fact. The closest the clock ever got was two minutes to midnight in 1953 when the United States and the USSR both tested nuclear bombs within a short time frame and the nuclear arms race really took off.
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Graph of the Doomsday Clock's Minutes to Midnight. |
The Cuban missile crisis ended on October 28, 1962, to the relief of the entire world, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union planned to dismantle the missile sites in Cuba. A strategic victory was won for the United States, the Monroe Doctrine, and President Kennedy while a proverbial victory was won for reason, logic, and humanity as a whole. The human race had, at least for the moment, avoided the promises of mutual assured destruction in a nuclear war between the superpowers, a phrase fittingly made into an acronym: MAD.
It is a one-sided judgment on the crisis that happened, the opposite
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