Black Saturday the Closest Call to Catastrophe

October 27, 1962 ('Black Saturday') was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear catastrophe, with three or four near-simultaneous events—a downed U-2 over Cuba, a U-2 straying into Soviet airspace, local anti-aircraft fire on US planes against Kennedy's red line, and a nuclear-armed submarine incident—any one of which could have triggered a nuclear exchange.