Carl Robichaud

at all costs.

So Kennedy looked Khrushchev in the eye, Khrushchev blinked, the US won.

That's the story that people knew because the deal to remove the missiles from Turkey was secret and was only revealed 30 years later.

And only six people knew about that deal.

So what actually saved us in that crisis was not fierce brinksmanship, but the fact that both men, both Kennedy and Khrushchev, acknowledged their vulnerability and their fear.

And they could see that this was a shared problem that could take down both their nations.

And so both men blinked.

And that's why we avoided nuclear use.

Yeah, nobody should ever be put in that position.

And the fact that we relied on Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov to make that call, we need to move away from a system where that's even possible.

And people are not equipped to make these kinds of decisions under duress.

It's just not something that we're wired for.

And even as you say, with political leaders like Kennedy and Khrushchev, yeah, Kennedy was elected and delegated with this level of responsibility.

But even then, the pressure to put on a single individual, I think we should reject that and we should move away from systems in which one person is forced to make a decision about the fate of the nation.

And

15 minutes or less in some cases.

We still have these very tight timelines for decision-making, even today.

We've built this incredible doomsday machine.

And each step along the way, there was a rationale for doing what we did.

And it was driven by this sense of competition.