Eves of an end of the world

There are evidences that the human mind cannot or does not know how to face.

One of them is how close the world was to a nuclear apocalypse during several days at the end of October 1962. We distractedly remember documentaries about that Soviet missile crisis in Cuba, and, as it has been exactly 60 years since it happened, we look at everything with the indifference with which threats abolished are remembered, or even with the retrospective confidence that if that danger was averted it could not have been too serious either.

What the rational mind cannot conceive the imagination refuses to represent.

Books and documentaries about those October days build to a

narrative that reaches its resolution after the maximum tension: Soviet ships with nuclear weapons sail across the Atlantic towards Cuba;

President Kennedy has decreed the blockade, and if the ships do not abide by it, he will consider it an act of war;

at the last moment, in Moscow, Khrushchev capitulates and orders the ships to turn around.

As in a duel from the West, in a crossover of Sergio Leone's close-ups, one of the two keeps his gaze fixed and the other blinks, and the world, the spectators, breathe with relief.

The stories serve to give an intelligible form to the confusion and the fog of the facts;

its purpose is not the transmission of knowledge but the relief of uncertainty, the assurance that each enigma has a solution and each argument an outcome, and that there is a logical order, a proportionality, between causes and effects.

What makes rigorous historical research so unsettling is that it unravels all these certainties one by one.

The more detailed the knowledge, the more disturbing becomes the evidence that public affairs are governed by chance, ignorance, irrationality, caprice, and that those in power often act blindly, as if moving through rooms. dark in which they do not get to see each other.

This image of dazed men groping in the dark is used several times by Serhii Plokhy in

his exhaustive account of those days in October 1962 that Turner has published in Spanish, translated by Verónica Puertollano.

A Ukrainian historian and professor at Harvard, Plokhy is extremely sensitive to the horrors his homeland has suffered in the 20th century.

He is the author of the most complete study that I know of on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and without a doubt that painful closeness to the danger and fear of atomic explosions has prompted him in his investigation of everything that happened and what was about to to happen from the day at the end of August in which a spy plane detected a Soviet missile installation in Cuba.

Plokhy has the advantage of having examined the archives of the United States and those of the Soviet Union with the same depth.

On either side, Kennedy and Khrushchev,

and the attendants and courtiers of each of them act in simultaneous ignorance of the motives and intentions of the other, and are carried away by similar impulses of suspicion and boastfulness, of recklessness and caution, of terror and dizziness before the consequences. inconceivable that may cause the decisions they make.

Kennedy asks an adviser to calculate the approximate number of victims that a nuclear attack on the United States could have and is paralyzed by the answer: "Between 80 and 90 million."

Kennedy and Khrushchev are equally anguished by the fear of appearing weak, by the pressure of those who urge them to launch an attack before the one that the enemy already seems to be about to launch.

In every crisis there are great specialists in adding fuel to the fire.

The United States military leadership prepares all kinds of reports to justify an immediate invasion of Cuba.

In Havana, Fidel Castro sends letters and telegrams to Khrushchev begging him to start a nuclear attack on the United States.

But more catastrophic than a conscious decision can be a misunderstanding, a mistake, a mechanical breakdown.

The pilot of a U-2 spy plane loses course flying over the North Pole and inadvertently breaks into Soviet airspace, raising alarm that this may be the beginning of the ultimate nuclear attack.

On those days there are 72 B-52 bombers loaded with atomic weapons flying on permanent alert and refueling in the air to avoid being surprised by an enemy attack on the ground and to be in a position to respond immediately against the territory of the USSR.

In those hours of extreme tension, a single accident would have been enough to trigger the apocalypse.

In the early morning of October 26, in the Sargasso Sea,

a US Navy ship keeps a close eye on a Soviet submarine that has just surfaced.

An American plane also flies over the scene, and the pilot launches some flares to illuminate the submarine and take pictures.

The captain of the submarine thinks that they are under attack and decides to respond by firing a torpedo.

The torpedo has such a powerful nuclear warhead that if dropped on a city it would annihilate everything within a kilometer radius.

The captain of the submarine thinks that the Third World War has already started, and that the destiny of him and his crew is to immolate himself fighting for the homeland.

At the last moment, an officer demands that the captain cancel the shot: he has seen that from the deck of the American ship someone was making Morse signals with a spotlight,

and that the urgent message is not a threat but an apology for the inconvenience of the plane's fireworks.

That morning, on the high seas, without anyone knowing, not even themselves, those two sailors, the American and the Soviet, saved the world.

Serhii Plokhy respectfully records their names: Gary Slaughter, Valentin Savitsky.

Plokhy, as the historian that he is, vindicates the practical value of history's lessons: throughout that crisis, President John Kennedy kept in mind a then recently published book,

Barbara Tuchman's masterful account of the folly, the carelessness, the flukes, the misunderstandings that in the summer of 1914 led European leaders into a war whose destructive scale none of them foresaw or could imagine.

With an equivalent irresponsibility, with a levity for which they themselves regretted and were later horrified, Kennedy and Khrushchev became entangled in a fencing of rudeness that brought the world to the edge of an abyss with no possible return.

That the human mind has the power to create bombs that can destroy life on planet Earth is proof of its sophistication, and also of its terrifying imbecility.

Sixty years after those October days there are more nuclear weapons than ever, many of them in the hands of lunatics, enlightened people, cold genocides,

all of them subject to the inevitable fallibility of efforts and human calculations, breakdowns, carelessness, accidents.

The role that remains for the vast majority of us is that of hostages or victims.

Perhaps the inability to truly imagine a danger against which we can do nothing is a sign of sanity, or outright fatalism.

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