23. The Lost Pilot Who Almost Turned the Cold War Hot
The closest the world ever came to a nuclear holocaust was probably the 1962 Cuban Missile, as the American and Soviet governments stared each other down, with fingers on nuclear hair triggers. It was bad, but most folk who lived through the crisis did not know just how bad. As was revealed years later, billions around the world might have perished because of a screwup: an American spy plane that accidentally blundered deep into Soviet airspace at the height of the crisis. The near-catastrophe began at 1:45 PM on October 27th, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was informed that a U-2 spy plane, that flew from a base in Alaska, had gone missing inside Soviet airspace.
The plane was supposed to fly just outside the Soviet border, where it was to test clouds drifting from the USSR for radioactive particles. However, its hapless pilot, a certain Charles Maultsby, ended up blundering deep into the USSR, and the Soviets scrambled fighters to shoot him down. It was the worst possible moment for such a mishap, as the Soviets might have viewed the incursion as a deliberate provocation. Luckily, the U-2 made it back to base, but Kennedy, who called its pilot a “son of a bitch”, made sure that he never flew a U-2 again.
