Today Is...The Most Dangerous Moment In Human History

The Cuban Missile Crisis is said to be the nearest we have ever come to a Nuclear War but events today in 1962 showed just how close we really did come and how we have one Soviet Chief of Staff to thank that we never.
As the Cuban Missile Crisis was coming to a head, a group of United States Navy Destroyers noticed a nuclear armed Soviet submarine off the coast of Cuba and tried to force it to the surface by dropping depth charges.
The Submarine had been too far down to receive radio signals from Moscow and with depth charges going off around them, the captain of the submarine decided that a war must have already started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.
As it took the three top officers on the Submarine to agree to launch an attack, the three men got together and two said to launch but one, Vasily Arkhipov, was against the idea and wanted to surface first and find out from Moscow if they were actually at war.
As the majority was not reached, the submarine surfaced where it was met by the American ships and fighter jets and after a discussion around whether they were actually at war yet and on hearing they weren't, they set a course back to the Soviet Union.
Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, stated that: 'We came very, very close to nuclear war, closer than we knew at the time' and an advisor to the John F. Kennedy administration called it : 'The most dangerous moment in human history'.