The human species is extremely fortunate that the two individuals who were the heads of their nuclear weaponized governments those many years ago were able to resist the immense institutional pressures they were under to throw down the gauntlet. It was a close run thing, as Wellington said of Waterloo. But our species is equally fortunate that Vasili Arkhipov and William Bassett rose to their occasionsl. If one of them had not done so, Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s efforts to keep the lid on things would have failed and they would have gone down as the two greatest villains in history. That is if there had been anyone still around to write it and read it. The fact that the two leaders were each deeply shaken by the experience accelerated the direct, back-channel communications between them that had begun not long after the Berlin crisis of 1961. They both realized that the best way to avoid nuclear war was for the governments to respect each other enough so as to minimize confrontations between them.