During the height of the Cold War, America used the policy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. The theory was that if we and the USSR built up our nuclear forces so much that if we had a war it would destroy the world, the only alternative would be not to shoot the first missile. But no one knew whether that was really mad or whether we could destroy the world.
On October 14, 1962, the U.S. discovered that Russia was installing nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba where they could be launched at the U.S. Florida is only 80 miles away from Cuba. President Kennedy put MAD to the test. He threatened that if Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, didn't take the missiles out he was going to press the button and launch our missiles. And he gave them a deadline.
"The deadline was approaching so I came home from school and went out on the front lawn so I could see the missiles when they were launched, because he [President Kennedy] might have launched early as a first strike. I had a test the next day so the big decision was whether to study or wait for doomsday to happen. I thought about it and decided to go in and study for the tests. My reasoning was if the bombs went off, it wouldn't matter whether I studied or not. As you can imagine the other part was that if the bombs didn't go off and I didn't study then it would matter.
So I decided at that point that I was only worried about those things that I could change and not worry about the things that I couldn't control. And when I woke up the next morning and the world was still there I knew that the MAD policy would work. I collected clippings to always be a reminder of my decision that no matter how bad things get outside of my control that I should always do the best that I could. From that point on I never worried about nuclear war again.
Stephen Patton
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