How likely was it for the Cold War to go hot?

What it says in the thread title: In retrospect, what probability do you give the Cold War going hot? Was it quite dangerous (so that we were really lucky not to get nuked), or was it never as dangerous as we all thought?

I put down five percent. There were close calls, and, there were enough people in high positions dedicated to keeping the world intact to minimize the risk to an extent.

I judge the probability of it going truly hot at 15 %, because I think, with MAD, no American President would be stupid enough to press the red button.
A Soviet leader is also unlikely to do it, although there could be some crazy guy there who could press the button after the USA provoked him with something. So not quite 0 %.

Stanislav Petrov. Really close. Not altogether LIKELY, but there's a definite possibility.

There were several points it could have exploded, but as shown the odds of anyone actually pushing the big red button seem fairly low. Far more likely is for a minor affair to some how flare up out of control but not go nuclear.

Beedok said:

There were several points it could have exploded, but as shown the odds of anyone actually pushing the big red button seem fairly low. Far more likely is for a minor affair to some how flare up out of control but not go nuclear.

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War by proxy did that anyway.

The probability it happening deliberately is low, maybe 1%. The probability of it happening accidently, or with some rogue commander, or something was way too high. I think we got very, very lucky.

I voted for 50%.

Berlin, cuban missile crisis, able archer, etc. Or a Kursk incident happens during heightened tensions. Or you get a Red October or Dr. Strangelove rogue military officer....

Probably quite high with Stalin and Mao around. Get rid of those two and nobody stupid enough to start it was in a position to do so. That only leaves accident and error, reducing the chances to virtually nil by the end.

Turek said:

Stanislav Petrov. Really close. Not altogether LIKELY, but there's a definite possibility.

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Not really. Petrov was only a single part of a much larger warning system. If he had passed it up the chain of command the PVO H.Q would have looked at the other parts of the warning system and judged it as a false alarm (unless somehow they were also showing a US attack).

Remember when NORAD received a false warning during the '80s? Pretty much the first thing they did was to switch to the secondary system and found it was an error caused by an exercise tape being loaded into the main system.

Petrov never claimed to have prevented anything and he was not actually relieved of his post for his actions, as is often commonly believed.

Want there an extremely close call after the fall of the USSR, in the 90s? When a joint Norwegian-American missile test was almost misinterpreted as being a nuclear missile launched at Moscow? If Wikipedia was correct, then Yeltsin almost pressed the Big Red Button.

Regardless of the cooler heads in control of both sides, the events surrounding Able Archer could have ended the world as we know it.

My dad says the closest it got was 80% with the Cuban Missile crisis. Thats how it felt of course, in Europe in any case. As far as i know, considdering it only had to be 1 mistake or 1 decision that could have set it off hypothetically then yes, 80% sounds about right(of 'a' war, not necessarily a nuclear holocaust of course).

With what we know now, probably 50-50 though.

Personally, I think we should all give thanks on a daily basis that the general's hand never slipped and hit the launch all missiles button by accident.

I said 15%. There's always the chance of accidents; but overall, the existence of so much diplomatic machinery to prevent this very thing from happening effectively ensured that it would not happen. Cuban Missile Crisis is about the closest we came to nuclear war; and that was effectively resolved thanks to said diplomatic machinery.

After Stalin I give it a 10% chance with it reaching 50% on days Soviet electronics decide to go buggy.

Even with the close calls I'd estimate around 15 - 20 percent.

I say forget talk about Mikhail Gorbachev being such a moderate reformer and ending the Cold War.

When it comes to the "Cold War NOT going hot" give some props to Lenoid Brezhnev.

Brezhnev was the man who presided over the Soviet Union when it was at its heights militarily and had numerous hard advantages over the United States. Yet his natural inclinations were toward meticulous caution and not confrontation. He was content to fund the arms race and tweek the U.S. in the Third World.

Stalin and Khruschev were far more openly confrontational.

Superman said:

If Wikipedia was correct, then Yeltsin almost pressed the Big Red Button.

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Not three words one often sees.

Anyone who thinks the Cold War was never going to go hot because our rationality would save us does not understand the Cold War nor human nature. There were so many screw ups, so many situations where someone thought missiles or bombers were incoming or that they were under attack and were ready to launch, so many situations where things got entangled and tense to the point where anything could have set something off. It's not "we could launch the button... but no". It was "is this an attack on our troops? we'll have to counterstrike" tensions build up, kaboom. Or "we detect incoming missiles". You cannot have situations like a submarine in the Cuban Missile crisis think it's being attacked and that the US and USSR are at war, and 3 guys voting on whether to launching their nuclear missiles with 1 guy holding it up, or war games being accidentally left in a NORAD computer and being thought by the next shift to be an actual atomic attack, or the Soviet detection of nuclear missiles in 1983 which were one guy (who refused, even when begged by his superiors, to launch off) and say nuclear war wasn't going to happen and the Cold War wasn't going to go hot. That shows an absolute delusion or an absolute ignorance which is exceedingly dangerous in the modern world.

At any second, the Cold War could have erupted into something. It's not just tensions building to an insurmountable amount to where any attack of one side's troops on the other's in even a small or brief thing would force things forward or where there could be a mistake that leads someone to launch a missile and thus bring down everything. It's all those mistaken detections and miscommunications. Our rationality will never save us.
This world we are living in should never be interpreted as the way it was meant to be or most likely to be. That is a tragically naive fallacy. We got lucky.

It was more than 50% for sure. Future generations will look back at 1945-1989 as perhaps the most dangerous time period in the history of the world.