4 Stories From The Cold War That'll Keep You Up At Night

3 We Somehow Lost A Spy Plane Over The USSR ... During The Cuban Missile Crisis

If the Cold War was a simmering pot of rage, the Cuban Missile Crisis represents the point when all the starch foam from your mac 'n' cheese boils over and burns on the stove top.

Yet somehow, in the midst of all that, one bumbling spy plane blundered into Soviet territory and nearly kick-started a war.

On October 27, 1962, a U-2 piloted by Captain Charles Maultsby took off from Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. As part of Project Star Dust, Maultsby's mission was simple: Fly headlong into clouds that drifted away from Soviet nuclear testing sites and sample them for radioactive particles, which could then be used to ascertain Soviet nuclear capabilities.

Maultsby never made it that far. Thanks to a combination of difficult-to-read celestial conditions (pilots in those days still used the stars to navigate), the awkwardness of the U-2, and plain bad luck, he unknowingly went off-course and entered USSR airspace -- an incursion which triggered the launch of six interceptor jets.

2 Two Scientists Died (In Separate Incidents) Messing About With The Same Nuclear Core

On August 21, 1945, Harry K. Daghlian Jr., an assistant physicist at Los Alamos, was undertaking an experiment with a spherical core of plutonium (code-named "Rufus") and a set of tungsten carbide bricks -- the object being to build a house of bricks around the core in order to generate a controlled nuclear reaction. As he was building, however, the core started to, as official physicist lingo puts it, go totally nutso. In his rush to compensate, Daghlian dropped a brick directly onto the exposed core, and was quickly enveloped in a beautiful hot blue light. Not usually a good sign when you're working with nuclear materials.

Daghlian received a radiation dosage nearing 40,000 rem -- and considering that a dosage of 5,000 rem is fatal, he was as super-dead as its physically possible for a person to be.

Only nine months later, Louis Slotin, another nuclear physicist, accidentally caused the exact same plutonium core to go totally nutso (told you that was the scientific terminology) on his internal organs. Henceforth it was no longer Rufus, but THE DEMON CORE (seriously). After getting hit with 21,000 rem of radiation, Slotin suffered for nine days before he died, after which hopefully somebody handed these guys some goddamn tongs or something.

1 The Military Wrote Up Increasingly Worrying Press Releases For The First Nuclear Test

Back in the 1940s, no one knew exactly what sort of monster they were unleashing with this whole nuclear bomb business. So on the off chance that the tests didn't quite go our way, the U.S. government hired William Laurence of The New York Times to write a whole suite of press releases that could be easily distributed following the country's first nuclear test, Trinity. They knew, at the very least, that the explosion would be LOUD, so that was the main premise of each release, with each one tailored to a different outcome.