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Lots of catastrophes came true. Your example of the Cuban Missile Crisis is particularly odd: there was nothing at all overblown about the worry, and there’s a pretty good case to be made that the fate of the world came down to a single tired, sweaty guy in a submarine making the right decision.

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For a couple weeks, there was almost nothing else in the news. JFK was a single tired guy in a submarine? We might be thinking of different Cuban Missile Crises.

https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis

Vasily Arkhipov was a single tired guy in a submarine. The Soviet submarine B-59 was being depth charged and its captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at the US Navy fleet that was pursuing it. Two other officers had to agree to launch the torpedo. One agreed, and Arkhipov was the other. They argued but he refused and convinced the captain to surface.

JFK's role was pretty important too. The military tried quite hard to convince him to go to war. Good thing he wasn't stuck in a broken-down, overheating submarine with explosions going off all around it, or he might not have been so steadfast.

The world was on the brink of a war that would make WWII look like a fun walk in the woods. Am I supposed to think that a couple of weeks of non-stop news coverage was excessive?

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