The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

The end of our world was almost televised.* At the moment of highest tension and drama during the Cuban Missile Crisis—with Soviet ships approaching the US naval quarantine line—enormous crowds stood in Times Square, reading the electronic news crawl flashing on the side of the buildings. All three US broadcast networks gave the crisis the equivalent of wall-to-wall-coverage. Primitive hand-drawn little maps behind the news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, with little paper ship counters occasionally being moved closer and closer to that line of quarantine, provided a countdown to catastrophe. The president and his people were watching this coverage, too, and the nation was holding its collective breath. This was quite a bit different from Edward R. Murrow’s groundbreaking live radio broadcast from London as the bombs were dropping on the city during the 1940 Blitz, because unless you lived in London, this didn’t have a direct effect on your life. The audience for this live event in 1962—regardless of where they lived—was watching to find out whether or not they would wake up the next morning, and whether or not their children would get to grow up.