However, human error and responses based on mistakes of interpretation greatly escalated the respective bombing campaigns of Britain and Germany. Specifically, both nations had purposely avoided bombing one another's civilian populations when, on August 24, 1940, several German bombers accidentally bombed residential areas of London (Commager & Miller, 2002). In response, Britain bombed factories and airfields near Berlin; the relative inaccuracy of bombing operations of the era lead Hitler to conclude that those raids were intended as attacks on civilians. He immediately began ordering indiscriminate bombing attacks on London, eventually exposing German civilians to even more intense bombing campaigns by the Allies later in the war (Commager & Miller, 2002). To a certain extent, the exchange of attacks on civilian population centers on both sides was the result of inadvertent misunderstanding of intentions that escalated the horrors of Word War II even further.
The Prospect of Inadvertent Nuclear War:
On January 25, 1995, the U.S. launched a research rocket jointly with Norway for the purposes of charting the Arctic (Roberts, 2000). Long-established protocols for notifying the Soviet Union of such events were followed but no message was ever received by Russian authorities. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was awakened in the middle of the night and proceeded, for the first time ever, to activate the nuclear launch codes for a counterattack on the United States (Roberts, 2000).
To Russian satellite monitoring systems, the research rocket had the same trajectory as a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired by a U.S. submarine in Arctic waters aimed directly at Russia (Roberts, 2000). During very tense conversations with the highest levels of political and military leadership, Yeltsin had only minutes to decide whether or not to believe that the information indicated an imminent attack on his nation and whether or not to retaliate with a nuclear launch of his own (Roberts, 2000).
The crisis was only averted when the alert was cancelled after Russian radar systems followed the missile out to sea (Roberts,...
The most disturbing aspect of what could have been an inadvertent nuclear attack on the U.S. is that procedures designed after the Cuban Missile Crisis were supposed to prevent any such miscommunication altogether (Roberts, 2000; Sorensen, 1965).
The Cuban Missile Crisis:
Perhaps the most well-known case of a near calamitous inadvertent escalation to all-out war are the circumstances surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In a series of communications, challenges, and potentially explosive measures such as the naval blockade of Cuba by U.S. warships in the path of Russian vessels, the two superpowers moved perilously close to armed confrontation (Sorensen, 1965).
What is somewhat less well-known is: (1) how close President John F. Kennedy was to ordering a U.S. invasion of Cuba after urging by his military leaders that such an invasion was imminently necessary to prevent the activation of Soviet nuclear ICBMs stationed on that Island barely 90 miles from North America; and (2) that retrospective analysis would eventually reveal that some of those missiles (in addition to tactical nuclear battlefield weapons) were already operational on Cuba (Cirincione, 2007; Roberts, 2000). Had the U.S. attempted to directly address the threat of nuclear ICBMs in Cuba by invading that nation with the sole intention of eliminating the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, it could have easily provoked such a disaster instead had President Kennedy followed the advice of his most senior military advisers (Cirincione, 2007; Roberts, 2000; Sorensen, 1965).
References
Cirincione, J. (2007). Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. New York: Columbia University Press.
Commager, H., Miller, D. (2002). The Story of World War II: Revised, Expanded & Updated from the Original Text by Henry Steele Commager. New York: Bantam
Books.
Hayes, C., and Faissler, M. (1999). Modern Times: The French Revolution to the Present.
New York: Macmillan.
Roberts, P. (2000). The Cold War. Sutton, UK: Sutton.
Sorensen, T. (1965). Kennedy. New York:…
