October 14th, 1962. The day the world could have ended.

Yes in 1962 on this date, U-2 spy planes sent into Cuba from the United States spotted and took photographs of Soviet medium range missiles just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It was unkwown to then President John F. Kennedy if the missiles carried nuclear warheads, which was a possibility, and if the USSR intended to attack America. This unfortunate situation lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis and almost threw the world into a global thermonuclear war, all because of the pictures those spy planes took, exactly fifty years ago today! United States citizens were prepared for the worst and drills were run just like in the classic 1950's "Duck and Cover" propaganda. It seemed as if the war with Russia was inevitably coming to it's climax in 1962. Luckily however, John Kennedy and Russia's political leaders struck a compromise and we avoided nuclear destruction. Yay! Funnily enough, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who periodically puts out a magazine picking a somewhat arbitrary time approaching midnight, with midnight being nuclear annihilation, never stated the time for 1962 and so we never really know how "close" we got according to them. In comparison, today with the heated tension over North Korea and Iran's nuclear programs, the time was 11:55 in January 2012.