One Word Away From Nuclear War (Noam Chomsky)

An alarming excerpt from Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival.

"A hair-raising account yesterday by a former Russian naval officer described how, on October 27, 1962, an American destroyer dropped depth charges on a Soviet submarine without realising that it was carrying a nuclear weapon."

"But the most dangerous moment of the crisis occurred late on Saturday afternoon, and the United States did not learn about it until almost 40 years later. Four Soviet submarines were being tracked in the area of the blockade line, but no American knew that each had a 15-kiloton nuclear torpedo aboard that their captains were authorized to use. At about 5 o'clock, the commander of submarine B-59, Capt. V. G. Savitskii, convinced that he was being attacked by the practice depth charges and grenades that U.S. Navy anti-submarine warfare (ASW) forces were dropping to force him to surface, loaded his nuclear torpedo and came within seconds of launching it at his antagonists. Had he fired that weapon, there is no doubt about the devastating consequences that would have followed."

Cuba in the Cross-Hairs: A Near Half-Century of Terror

Another example: "Following both intuition and the assumption that a real first strike would feature more than five missiles, he decided to report the alert as a malfunction, a false alarm. Which it was: The satellite had misread sunlight reflecting off clouds as a missile launch."