On the Brink

Fifty years ago this fall, the senior Soviet KGB resident in Washington helped the world avoid a Third World War. He did it by breaking the rules.

Alexander Semyonovich Feklisov died as a decorated Hero of Russia on October 26, 2007. Exactly 45 years prior, on October 26, 1962, Feklisov quietly helped the world avert nuclear carnage.

No longer on the other side of some strategic threshold, in October 1962 the threat of global annihilation was very real and very near – only as distant as the fingertips of generals awaiting U.S. President John Kennedy’s (or Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s) command to press the proverbial button.