History's Greatest Near Misses
Close Calls, Lucky Breaks and the Moments the World Almost Changed

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
On the night of 26 September 1983, a Soviet officer watched his screen report five American missiles heading for Moscow. He had minutes to decide. You have probably never heard his name, and that is exactly the point.

History is usually told through what happened. History's Greatest Near Misses tells twenty true stories of what almost did: bombs that didn't go off, bullets that missed by inches, storms that sank invasion fleets, and ordinary people who noticed something small. You'll hear about:

• The hydrogen bomb that fell on North Carolina in 1961, with one switch between it and disaster
• The submarine officer who refused to fire a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis
• The training tape and the 46-cent chip that triggered false nuclear alarms
• The folded speech that stopped a bullet aimed at Theodore Roosevelt
• The New York car that nearly killed Winston Churchill, and the wobbly chair that saved FDR
• The typhoons that saved Japan from Kublai Khan, and the fog that saved Washington's army
• The lighthouse weather report that delayed D-Day
• The lightning strike on Apollo 12 and the young engineer who knew the fix
• The 2012 solar storm that missed Earth by nine days, and the asteroid spotted a day too late
• The Lagos doctor who stopped Ebola, and the engineer who found a hidden backdoor because a login took half a second too long

Each chapter ends with What Almost Happened, an honest look at the world we narrowly avoided, and the final chapter separates fact from legend, including the soldier said to have spared Hitler.

Some of these stories stayed secret for decades. Others never made the news at all, because the disaster never came.
Gripping, carefully researched and made for listening, History's Greatest Near Misses is for anyone who loves true stories, and anyone who has ever wondered how close we came.