5. JFK Got Super Salty at a Pilot Who Almost Got Us Into WWIII
The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was the closest the world ever came to a radioactive holocaust, as the Americans and Soviets stared each other down, with itchy fingers hovering above the nuclear launch buttons. It was bad, but most folk who lived through it did not know at the time just how horrifyingly bad it had actually been. As was revealed years later, billions around the world might have perished, because an American spy plane had accidentally blundered deep into Soviet airspace at the height of the crisis.
On October 27th, 1962, at 1:45 PM, President Kennedy was informed that an American U-2 spy plane, flown by Charles Maultsby, flying out of 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. Its hapless pilot, however, 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 screwup, as the Soviets might have viewed the incursion as a deliberate provocation. Luckily, the plane made it back to base, but Kennedy, who called its pilot a “son of a bitch”, made sure he never flew a U-2 again.
