Blink Day

According to the This Day In History feature that appears on the comics page of the Globe, forty one years ago, Soviet Premier Khrushchev (big Nikita) announced that the Cuban missiles were being dismantled, and taken back to mother Russia.

A lot of young journalists today are referring to the so-called War on Terror as "World War 3."
But, not for me. I think the ending of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962 was the real WW3.
JFK ordered a blockade. He made the decision that those Soviet supply ships were not going to get though. It was the classical confrontation of two nuclear superpowers. The world held its breath, wondering what would happen next. And, the Soviets blinked.

As a twenty year old enlistee in the USAF who was on the front lines, waiting to die in a Defcom 5 multi-megaton atomic holocaust, I was particularly aware of these events. Note that the "front lines" were actually in Cheyenne Wyoming, where all of our country's operational Atlas Missile silos were located. We definitely believed that the birdies would fly and the world would be ruined for eternity.

But the Soviets backed-down, thank goodness. They blinked. I believe that moment was the beginning and the end of WW3. Only no one knew it at the time.