IT’S exactly sixty years since the Cuban missile crisis ‒ known to Russians as the Caribbean crisis. The climax lasted thirteen days and historians judge it to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war. Military assessments predicted 200 million people might die. Sanity prevailed and the leaders of the USA and Soviet Union, using back channels, not only saw sense, but set up the famous hot line to prevent another near disaster.

I remember it all only too well. We lived in Nassau in the Bahamas as close to the epicentre of a possible war as it was possible to be. I was also worried that my father, still young enough to be a naval reserve officer, might be called up if war erupted. And on the autumn night of Saturday, 27 October 1962 I went to bed convinced that Armageddon was imminent. That was just a general guess, but not far from the truth.

Twenty-four hours earlier the American armed forces were put on a DEFCON2 alert, its B52 bombers on 15 minutes notice to launch a nuclear strike for the only confirmed time in history. The Russians announced they were not backing down and President John F. Kennedy reluctantly accepted that an American invasion of Cuba was probable. Russian nuclear missiles had been identified on Cuban soil and the Americans had established out in the Atlantic an 800-kilometre radius quarantine zone for offensive weapons. This was a breach of international law; in effect an act of war. The Russians had, surprisingly, already turned around fourteen of their ships bound for Cuba.

But earlier that Friday the USS Beale had attacked a Russian submarine with signalling depth charges. The submarine’s commander was under orders to launch a 15-kiloton nuclear device should the vessel be holed, but required consent from two other officers. The vessel was undamaged but he and one other officer were ready to fire. The third, Visili Arkhipov, exercised his veto and the submarine surfaced. He probably saved the world from catastrophe.

But so-called Black Saturday was the most dangerous day of all. An American U2 reconnaissance plane from Alaska strayed into Soviet air space and engagement between American and Russian fighter jets over the Bering Sea was narrowly averted. Another U2 was shot down over Cuba causing the only combat fatality of the crisis. The ever-hawkish American military was pressing Kennedy to invade Cuba on Monday, not knowing that they had identified only 33 of 42 medium-range (2 000 to 4 500 kilometre) ballistic missiles at nine sites capable of striking most of the USA.

The CIA’s reckless adventurism in Cuba provided the Soviet Union with an opportunity. An attack on Cuba would give the green light to march into West Berlin. Operation Anadyr, the transfer of nuclear missiles to Cuba, was undertaken under great secrecy and disguised as an agricultural project. Anadyr is a river that flows into the Bering Sea and personnel were fitted with parkas and ski boots as further deception, although the missiles were bizarrely camouflaged as palm trees.

The Russians lied persistently about Anadyr, which started on 8 September, although the Americans confirmed its existence only on 14 October because U2 surveillance flights had been suspended. But there were now hostile nuclear weapons in a country about 150 kilometres from Florida. Fortunately, cool heads prevailed, missiles were withdrawn on both sides, and the quarantine and DEFCON2 were lifted by 20 November.

So, the small boy in Nassau, sandwiched between Cuba and Florida and their large hostile nuclear arsenals, survived. It had been a close call: the historian Eric Hobsbawm described it as ‘playing a game with nuclear bowls which they knew it would be suicide to use, but which might easily slip out of control.’ But, unbelievably, war criminals in the Kremlin faced by a military shambles after their invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 are now hinting at use of a nuclear weapon.

Russia, a member of the United Nations Security Council, has basically torn up the rule of international law. One of the main requirements of an eventual ceasefire will be accountability for war crimes that will involve the prosecution of Russian military personnel and politicians. As the day of reckoning draws closer, desperation and the temptation to use a nuclear device grow.

The results will be disastrous for Russia as NATO will retaliate with conventional weapons. But while the doomed invasion of Ukraine was one decision of monumental stupidity, that does not rule out another. There are reportedly a number of nuclear attack possibilities: an atmospheric detonation over the Black Sea; use of a tactical weapon to disrupt Ukrainian de-occupation of the Donbas; an attack on Kyiv to wipe out the government; or targeting a supply hub in Poland. The Americans and their allies have told the Kremlin of the devastating consequences: one is the annihilation of the Russian Black Sea fleet. They would not need nuclear weapons to inflict immense damage on Russia’s already fragile military. But as Hobsbawm warned, loss of control and unforeseen consequences could result in the Armageddon that was averted in sixty years ago.

The numbers of people leaving Russia to evade military conscription tell a significant tale. But worryingly they are among the most aware members of what is fundamentally a medieval society dominated by a czar, fuelled by primitive nationalism and warlike imperial ambition, and egged on by patriarchal religion. Its people have never known true democracy and the treatment meted out to Ukraine suggests that they care nothing for anyone else’s when populist fires are stoked. In these circumstances almost anything is possible and global hopes are pinned on cool heads wanting to preserve the Russian military.

At the same time in East Asia another brutal dictator is flexing his military muscle. Is it possible that Russia is enabling North Korea and planning to use it as a nuclear proxy?

• First published in the Witness on 13 October 2022.