On the American side ... a U-2 pilot ... blundered over the Soviet Union at the height of the crisis on 27 October after being sent on a mission to the North Pole to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.
[T]he Russians ... scramble[d] half a dozen Mig fighters in response. The [US] Air Force failed to inform the president of what had happened until half an hour after he left Soviet air space.
On the Russian side, communications were so bad that Khrushchev could only exercise tenuous control over his troops on Cuba.
The nuclear missiles aimed at Guantanamo were under the command of a major.
There were no locks or codes to prevent them being fired.
(My emphasis.)
This, after yesterday hearing a BBC programme about the Soviet missile officer Stanislav Petrov. That programme included informed commentary from various pundits about the technical problems of the Soviet defences, including claims that on several occasions Soviet ballistic-missile submarines had received mistaken "orders" to fire and had never passed the info back up the chain of command; and that this had led to American temptation to tell the USSR that its systems were an accident waiting to happen.
We must all have been fucking mad.
Question arising:
Surely it is in the best interests of the participants in this sort of cold war to give the opposition state-of-the-art technical advice?
and I know what you mean. to me, Radio 1 is nothing since John Peel died. I haven't listened to it (voluntarily) since. he was so much more than just another voice on the radio, wasn't he?