South Korean protesters at an anti-North Korea rally, February 2016, Seoul. Getty Images/Chung Sung-Jun. All rights reserved.The closest the world came to nuclear confrontation was the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. The near-catastrophe was one of the drivers for arms-control talks in the mid-1960s, which led to the limited test-ban treaty (LTBT), the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), and other endeavours. But these were never enough to curb the nuclear-arms race.
The next opportunity was in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, only two years after the Able Archer "war scare" of 1983. That led to the intermediate nuclear-forces treaty (INFC), which got rid of the cruise missiles (based beside Greenham Common) and a few other weapons, but not much else.
Then came the Soviet collapse in 1990-91 and yet another opportunity, which was taken only in part. There was a substantial scaling-down of the ludicrously large nuclear arsenals on both sides (over 60,000 warheads in the late 1980s), but hope of moves towards a nuclear-free world came to nothing.
