There are several candidates for "the most dangerous moment". One is 27 October, when US destroyers enforcing the quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth-charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were "rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945".
In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Archipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the US reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke. Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (Defcon 2), which authorized "Nato aircraft with Turkish pilots ... [or others] ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb", according to Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, in Foreign Affairs.
Another candidate is the previous day, 26 October. That day is selected as "the most dangerous moment" by a B-52 pilot, Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those Nato aircrafts and provides a hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the crisis, "B-52s on airborne alert" with nuclear weapons "on board and ready to use". 26 October was the day when "the nation was closest to nuclear war," Clawson writes in his "irreverent anecdotes of an Air Force pilot", Is That Something the Crew Should Know? On that day, Clawson himself was in a good position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes that:
"We were damned lucky we didn't blow up the world – and no thanks to the political or military leadership of this country."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-missile-crisis-russian-roulette
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