History Close Calls & “Almost Happened” Moments

The psiandme History Close Calls & “Almost Happened” Moments quiz was created by psiandme.

Perhaps the most terrifying historical close calls involve the dawn of the atomic age, where the fate of humanity often rested on the shoulders of a single individual. During the tense days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine named B-59 was subjected to depth charges by U.S. forces. Believing World War III had already begun, the captain ordered the launch of a nuclear torpedo. Fortunately, Soviet officer Vasili Arkhipov refused to provide his required consent, single-handedly preventing a nuclear holocaust. Just two decades later, in 1983, another Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov correctly identified a satellite warning of incoming U.S. missiles as a false alarm caused by sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, once again saving the world from catastrophic retaliation.

The United States has had its own share of harrowing nuclear near misses, proving that technological glitches can be just as dangerous as geopolitical tension. In 1961, a B-52 bomber broke apart in the skies over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two massive nuclear payloads. Disaster was averted only because a single, fragile safety switch out of six managed to prevent one of the bombs from detonating. Later, in 1979, U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened in the middle of the night and told that thousands of Soviet missiles were inbound, only to discover moments before retaliating that a training tape had been accidentally loaded into the live early-warning system. Similarly, the 1983 NATO military exercise known as Able Archer was so realistic that Soviet leadership genuinely believed a first strike was imminent, bringing the superpowers dangerously close to an accidental war.

Beyond human error, the sheer unpredictability of nature has repeatedly altered the course of human civilization. In the 13th century, the seemingly unstoppable Mongol Empire attempted to invade Japan twice, but their massive fleets were decimated both times by sudden, violent typhoons that the Japanese later dubbed kamikaze, or divine wind. Centuries later, the famed Spanish Armada's attempt to invade England in 1588 was similarly thwarted by severe storms that scattered their ships, securing England's naval dominance. Even modern military operations have bowed to the weather; General Dwight D. Eisenhower famously delayed the D-Day invasion by a single day in 1944 due to poor conditions, seizing a brief window of clearing skies that ultimately allowed the Allied forces to gain a vital foothold in Europe.

The survival of key political figures has often come down to a matter of inches or sheer mechanical luck, drastically reshaping the political landscape. In 1835, an assassin approached U.S. President Andrew Jackson and fired two pistols at point-blank range, but in an astronomical stroke of luck, both weapons misfired. Decades later, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt while campaigning because the bullet was slowed by a thick, folded speech and a metal glasses case tucked into his breast pocket. Even the darkest chapters of history hinge on microscopic margins; the 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler failed largely because the explosive briefcase was moved just behind a heavy wooden table leg, shielding the dictator from the brunt of the blast and prolonging the Second World War.

In the realm of politics, the phrase that every vote counts is not just a platitude, but a documented historical reality. The disputed U.S. presidential election of 1876 was decided by a single electoral vote, with Rutherford B. Hayes securing 185 votes to Samuel Tilden's 184, fundamentally altering the trajectory of post-Civil War Reconstruction. At the state and local levels, the margins can be even tighter, with races literally ending in exact ties. In a 2017 Virginia House of Delegates race, a tied election was ultimately decided by drawing lots, a game of chance that determined the partisan balance of the entire legislative chamber. From Marcus Morton winning the 1839 Massachusetts gubernatorial race by exactly one vote out of over 100,000 cast, to modern local elections decided by drawing playing cards, democracy often balances on a razor's edge.

As humanity has advanced into the space age and built highly interconnected technological societies, our close calls have taken on entirely new dimensions. When Neil Armstrong manually piloted the Apollo 11 lunar module to the surface of the moon in 1969, he landed with only seconds of fuel remaining, narrowly avoiding an abort or a tragic crash on live global television. Back on Earth, our reliance on modern electronics nearly faced an existential threat in 2012 when a massive solar superstorm, comparable to the devastating 1859 Carrington Event, missed our planet by a mere nine days. Had Earth's orbit intersected with that coronal mass ejection, the resulting electromagnetic interference could have crippled global power grids, knocked out satellite communications, and caused trillions of dollars in damage, proving that our modern infrastructure remains highly vulnerable to the whims of the cosmos.

Studying these historical near misses provides a humbling perspective on the fragility of human progress and the sheer role of chance in our daily lives. Whether it is a misunderstood press conference that accidentally opens the Berlin Wall, or a single vote that admits a massive new territory into a nation, the timeline we inhabit is just one of countless possible outcomes. By understanding the narrow margins that have dictated our past, we can better appreciate the immense weight of the decisions we make today. These incredible stories remind us that history is never truly predetermined, and that the future remains unwritten, waiting to be shaped by the next unpredictable variable.

For more information about our online tests and quizzes, consult our Terms of Service.