Cuban Missila Crisis???

 In 1962, I had to sleep on the floor. There was talk that the US was very close to having a massive fleet of nuclear bombs dropping all over the US. Obviously, the targets would include US military sites and all major cities, and we lived in a small town and had lots of relatives who lived in major cities, so they all came to our little town, too small and insignificant to be a target, and far from any possible target. They stayed at my father's house and my uncle's house and two of them got my bed and others got the spare beds and the couch and I had to sleep on the floor. For years, many Americans thought we'd been very close to complete nuclear destruction.

In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis started in 1961 when the US put nuclear missiles in Turkey. The Soviets vehemently objected, and the US leadership basically said, 'So what can you do about it? Those missiles are staying in Turkey.'

So the evil Soviets, completely unprovoked, threatened to put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the US were ready to nuke the Soviet Union to teach them that putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was a clear and flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

So President Kennedy made a fatal phone call to Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Kennedy said, 'I have to run for re-election and you don't, so if you'll say, "The USSR is taking all our missiles out of Cuba and will never put any missiles in Cuba," we'll take all our missiles out of Turkey, and you don't have to give us anything but your pretence that the US got everything and the USSR got nothing.' So Secretary Khrushchev agreed, since he thought he had nothing to lose. The US secretly removed all the missiles, with USSR inspectors verifying that there were no US missiles left in Turkey, and the US intelligence services were furious, as were the Soviet intelligence services.

The US intelligence services got rid of Kennedy in 1963, and the USSR intelligence services got rid of Khrushchev in 1964, as anyone who knew the intelligence services knew they would.

But there was never a crisis, there was never a real threat of nuclear war in 1962 because the US and USSR both had decent leaders who were able to defang the situation with no real threat (but they allowed ordinary people to think there had been a threat from which they had saved the world).

Khrushchev had to keep his victory secret, so USSR intelligence forces decided they had to get rid of him, and the US security forces could never forgive Kennedy for coming up with a serious loss that only looked like a great victory. 

(Of course, while the US had to remove all those missiles from Turkey, they moved them all to Türkiye, but they are no longer aimed at the USSR, now they're aimed at Russia.)