WE focus on the end of the world in this week’s Remember When.

Or rather, we focus on the closest this planet has come to the end of the world: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Precisely 50 years and four days ago, page 8 of the Swindon Advertiser included a consumer article by ‘A Woman Correspondent’, headlined: “Fabrics Safe from Flames”.

One of the accompanying photographs was captioned: “This ‘safer from fire’ Bri-nylon nightdress is in gay pillar box red and trimmed with Bri-nylon lace.”

The appearance of the article on that day may have been a coincidence, but we like to think it was a little defiant black humour as the Adver, Swindon and the rest of the world waited for possible thermonuclear annihilation.

The same page of the paper also included an article about drip-dry wigs, so with hair loss a well-known symptom of radiation sickness it seems the Swindon woman of 1962 would have been prepared for anything.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days and started on Tuesday, October 16 when President John F Kennedy was made aware by his advisors of Soviet nuclear missiles on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, meaning the Soviets had the ability to make widespread attacks on the United States.

Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev hoped to use the missiles’ presence as a bargaining chip to drive Western forces and influence from West Berlin and have American missiles removed from various European countries. The gravity of the situation became apparent to the world a few days later when Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba and said any missile launch from Cuba would provoke all-out war.

The crisis ended when the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US removing missiles from Turkey and Southern Italy.

In the days leading to the final escalation, Adver front pages were filled with conventional local newspaper fare – a train crashed in Hertfortshire, a Swindon boy was injured when he removed the gunpowder from several bangers and lit it.

On Tuesday, August 23, however, Adver readers were greeted by the headline: “Total mobilisation ordered by Castro”.

The editor came out broadly in favour of the US, and wrote of: “...the conviction that Communism is a living aggressive force and that if we show any sign of accommodation we shall lose more, until we have lost all.”

The next day, with 25 Soviet ships steaming defiantly toward blockaded Cuba, we wrote: “This is a fateful day for the world – as fateful perhaps as the day Hitler sent his troops into the Rhineland, or the Sudatenland of Czechoslovakia. If history has taught us anything it is that a totalitarian regime bent on world domination is never satisfied with concessions or minor victories.”

A day after that, we revealed that Swindon and District CND was calling for both sides to meet around a negotiating table. Our reporter, who may have been somewhat biased, wrote: “With tension rising in Cuba, Swindon and district group of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has reacted in predictable fashion.”

The sabre rattling continued into the weekend before both sides agreed concessions and the immediate threat of global war was averted.

The last local act in the conflict came from CND, who wrote to Kennedy asking that he dismantle all US nuclear bases outside the US. It is not known whether the president received the letter.