Fear and Cold War Culture

From Await­ing Armaged­don:

U.S. paral­y­sis on civil defense could be cred­ited to an inabil­ity to face the prospect of nuclear war or sim­ply to a sense of futil­ity. … Intel­lec­tu­ally, Amer­i­cans knew the haz­ards of nuclear war, but Amer­ica was not ready [dur­ing the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis] … The United States sim­ply had refused to accept that war might erase or, at the very least, dev­as­tate the future. As a result, civil defense was kept on a back burner, par­tially because the nation’s lead­ers failed to tell the pub­lic the truth that the United States had lit­tle means of pro­tect­ing its cit­i­zens from total war. This dis­con­nec­tion in the Amer­i­can psy­che an inabil­ity to face the loss of the future that could result from rabid anti – Com­mu­nism left the nation vul­ner­a­ble to war and to false claims of safety. Cold War cul­ture taught Amer­i­cans to fear, but it did not offer a refuge from the dead­liest threat, nuclear attack (61).

From “When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction:”

In Novem­ber 1983 a rou­tine NATO nuclear readi­ness exer­cise code-​named Able Archer could have led to a Soviet nuclear strike against the West. What is remark­able about this pos­si­ble Soviet strike is that it was per­ceived by the Sovi­ets as a defen­sive and pre – emp­tive strike. There­fore, the Sovi­ets some­how believed that there was an impend­ing West­ern nuclear attack that they had to pre – empt. Amer­i­can rear­ma­ment, NATO mis­sile deploy­ment, and Rea­gan­ite rhetoric some­how con­vinced the Sovi­ets that the nuclear endgame was near. These fears cli­maxed in Novem­ber 1983 dur­ing a seem­ingly innocu­ous nuclear-​readiness exer­cise by the West. It has been described by his­to­rian Christo­pher Andrew as one of the most dan­ger­ous moments of the Cold War.

How many other such “moments” exist?