If you really want to sum up a particular period in global history in a way that genuinely oversimplifies things, it's clear that the Cold War was really, really tense. From the late 1940s until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were constantly at odds and preparing for the other side to instigate war. And this wouldn't be a conventional war, either. Instead of ground-based offensives or airborne dogfights, if the Cold War turned hot, it would almost certainly involve the detonation of some of the world's increasingly large arsenal of nuclear weapons.

That left people seemingly everywhere on high alert, with militaries on both sides arming submarines, planes, rockets, and more with nuclear warheads. The accidental launch of one w

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