The Cuban Missile Crisis
For thirteen days, one Soviet submarine officer was the only thing between humanity and nuclear war
Open
The story as it is usually told happens in two rooms. A cabinet room in Washington and an office in Moscow, thirteen days, two men, and a blink.
The moment that came closest to ending it was neither of those rooms. It was two hundred feet under the Sargasso Sea, in a submarine that had been out of contact with Moscow for days, and it turned on one officer refusing.
And the thing that makes the whole crisis look different is a number that Washington did not learn for forty years. There were already a hundred and sixty two nuclear warheads on the island.
Scene 1Thirteen minutes
The fourteenth of October. A U-2 flies over western Cuba and photographs construction near San Cristobal.
The photographs show launch sites for Soviet medium range missiles. From there, a warhead reaches Washington in thirteen minutes.
The President is briefed before breakfast on the sixteenth. By midday fourteen men are sitting in the Cabinet Room with one instruction: find a way to get them out.
One of the first voices in the room argues for airstrikes immediately. The President's brother passes him a note saying he now understands how the Japanese commander felt planning Pearl Harbor.
Scene 2The word
They argue for six days before the public is told anything.
The Joint Chiefs are unanimous. Strike the sites from the air, then invade. Their chairman tells the President that anything less is appeasement, and uses Munich as the comparison, to a man whose father had been the ambassador in London during Munich.
Kennedy takes a middle path and a careful word. Not a blockade, because a blockade is an act of war in international law. A quarantine.
His own defence secretary makes the argument that the missiles change nothing strategically, because the Soviet Union can already reach American cities from home. What they change is the appearance of it, ninety miles offshore, and appearance is what the crisis is about.
Scene 3Black Saturday
On the twenty fourth the Soviet ships approaching the line stop or turn back, and that is the moment everyone remembers.
The problem is that the missiles already ashore keep going up. By the twenty sixth, American intelligence believes two dozen launchers are operational.
The twenty seventh is the day everything happens at once.
A U-2 is shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface to air missile. The pilot, Rudolf Anderson, is killed. Under the rules the Americans set themselves, that is the trigger for striking back.
At the same time, in the Sargasso Sea, American destroyers are dropping practice depth charges on a Soviet submarine to force it up. The boat is B fifty nine. It has been submerged for days, the air is foul, the temperature inside is over fifty degrees, and it has heard nothing from Moscow.
It is carrying a torpedo with a nuclear warhead. The captain concludes that war has started above him and orders it armed.
Soviet regulations on that boat require three officers to agree. Two do. The third, the flotilla commander, refuses, and argues that surfacing and being humiliated is better than starting a nuclear war.
His name was Vasili Arkhipov. The submarine surfaced.
Nobody in Washington knew that had happened. Nobody in Washington knew it for another forty years.
It came out at a conference in Havana, in two thousand and two, when the men who had been on that boat were in a room with the men who had been in that cabinet.
Scene 4The part that was not announced
That same evening the President's brother meets the Soviet ambassador privately at the Justice Department, and gives him two things.
A deadline. Remove the missiles or they will be removed by force.
And an offer. American Jupiter missiles will come out of Turkey within six months. But if the Soviet Union ever says that this was part of the bargain, the deal is off and the United States will deny it.
On the twenty eighth, Radio Moscow announces the missiles are going home. The public version of events is that the Soviet Union backed down and the United States conceded nothing.
The Jupiters came out of Turkey in April.
John Kennedy said this to an aide on the worst day of it.
· Remark to aide Kenny O'Donnell · October 27, 1962
“It is insane and very sad that two men sitting on opposite sides of the world should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.”
Five accounts
Five accounts, and the one that is almost always missing is the one whose territory this was.
victorAmerican
The American room
The first account is the one that was written first and taught longest, and its subject is decision making under pressure.
A young president resists his own generals. He invents an option nobody had offered him. He holds his nerve for six days and then for six more, and the other side gives way.
The line that fixed it in the public mind came from the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, on the twenty fourth, watching the Soviet ships stop.
“We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
It is a good line, it was said, and it describes about one day of a thirteen day crisis.
Read the full account
Narrative
The missiles appeared in the photographs on Tuesday morning. McGeorge Bundy briefed Kennedy before breakfast. By noon, the fourteen men who would become ExComm were seated in the Cabinet Room. Dean Acheson, brought in as an elder statesman, argued immediately for airstrikes. Robert Kennedy slid a note across the table to his brother: "I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor."
The debate that followed, six days before Kennedy went public, became the defining case study in crisis decision-making. Robert Kennedy's posthumous memoir Thirteen Days (1969) portrays ExComm as a deliberative body that tested every option against its consequences. McNamara argued that the missiles did not alter the strategic balance (the Soviets already had ICBMs capable of reaching the U.S.) but acknowledged their political significance: medium-range missiles ninety miles off the coast changed the perception of American vulnerability. Kennedy rejected the Joint Chiefs' unanimous recommendation for airstrikes, calculating that bombing Soviet personnel would trigger a response against Berlin, the real Soviet pressure point.
The quarantine walked a legal line. Stevenson argued it should go through the UN; the lawyers found authority in the Rio Treaty of 1947, which allowed collective self-defense measures by Western Hemisphere nations. The Organization of American States approved the quarantine 19-0 on October 23. On the floor of the UN Security Council, Stevenson confronted Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin with blown-up U-2 photographs: "Don't wait for the translation. Yes or no?" Zorin refused to answer. Stevenson's retort, "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over", became the most replayed moment of Cold War diplomacy.
The American narrative frames the outcome as a victory for calibrated pressure. Kennedy chose the quarantine over airstrikes, gave Khrushchev time to respond, and opened a back channel through Robert Kennedy and Dobrynin. The Jupiter missiles in Turkey, obsolete and already scheduled for removal, were the private price. Publicly, Kennedy appeared to have stared down Khrushchev without conceding anything. The reality (that the resolution required American concessions kept secret from Congress and the press) did not emerge until the 1980s, when Dobrynin published his memoirs and the Kennedy tapes were declassified.
What the American perspective celebrates is the system working under extreme pressure: civilian control overriding military advice, back-channel diplomacy preventing escalation, and a president who chose the option that left his adversary a way out. What it struggles to acknowledge is that the crisis was itself a product of American actions. The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, the CIA's Operation Mongoose (ongoing sabotage against Cuba), and the Jupiter deployment in Turkey gave Khrushchev both motive and justification.
Arguments
- Kennedy's quarantine was a masterpiece of calibrated escalation, firm enough to compel withdrawal, restrained enough to avoid war
- Civilian leadership overrode unanimous military advice for airstrikes, preventing catastrophic escalation
- The secret Jupiter deal showed pragmatic statesmanship, trading obsolete missiles for peace
- ExComm's deliberative process became the gold standard for crisis decision-making
Sources
- Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis
- The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
- One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
bystanderSoviet
The Soviet calculation
The second account starts from a map.
American Jupiter missiles were already in Turkey, fifteen minutes from Moscow. Khrushchev's question, asked out loud to his defence minister on a beach on the Black Sea, was why the Americans should have that right and the Soviet Union should not.
What followed was called Operation Anadyr, and it was enormous. Forty two thousand troops, three dozen medium range missiles, bombers, fighters, and those tactical warheads, moved across the Atlantic disguised as agricultural shipments.
Soldiers were issued winter clothing and told they were going somewhere cold. They unpacked it in Havana.
The whole plan depended on the missiles being operational before anyone noticed. He missed by about ten days.
“I will tell you one thing. Nuclear war is out of the question. We're not lunatics.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Khrushchev conceived the missile deployment in May 1962 while walking along the Black Sea coast with Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky. Malinovsky pointed across the water toward Turkey: American Jupiter missiles sat there, fifteen minutes from Moscow. "Why," Khrushchev asked, "should the Americans have the right to put missiles next to us, but we should not have the right to put missiles next to them?"
The deployment, Operation Anadyr, moved 42,000 Soviet troops, 36 SS-4 medium-range missiles, 24 SS-5 intermediate-range launchers (never completed), 162 tactical nuclear warheads, IL-28 bombers, and MiG-21 fighters to Cuba between July and October 1962. The operation was disguised as agricultural equipment shipments. Troops wore civilian clothes and were told they were going to a cold climate; they packed winter gear to Havana. The deception held until October 14 because Khrushchev gambled that the missiles would be operational before discovery. He lost that gamble by roughly ten days.
Khrushchev's motivations were layered. He wanted to protect Cuba from another Bay of Pigs, an invasion he believed Kennedy was actively planning under Operation Mongoose. He wanted to close the missile gap cheaply: the Soviet Union had only 20 ICBMs capable of reaching the continental United States, while the Americans had 170 ICBMs, plus Jupiters in Turkey and Italy. Placing medium-range missiles in Cuba would roughly double Soviet first-strike capability overnight, at a fraction of the cost of building more ICBMs. And he wanted to demonstrate to Beijing, where Mao was already calling him soft on imperialism, that the Soviet Union would defend its allies.
When Kennedy announced the quarantine, Khrushchev faced a choice between escalation and retreat. On October 26, he sent Kennedy a long, rambling, emotional letter proposing a deal: he would remove the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. The next morning, a second, more formal letter (likely drafted by the Foreign Ministry) added the demand for Jupiter removal from Turkey. The dual letters created confusion in Washington about Soviet intentions. Robert Kennedy's solution, respond to the first letter and ignore the second, became known as the "Trollope ploy."
Khrushchev agreed to withdraw on October 28. In Soviet internal discussions, he framed the outcome as a mutual concession: Cuba was secured against invasion, the Jupiters would leave Turkey (secretly), and nuclear war had been avoided. "We looked into the abyss," he told the Presidium. His opponents, who would depose him in October 1964, saw capitulation. Arkhipov's role aboard B-59 remained classified until after the Soviet Union collapsed. Moscow had not known, during the crisis itself, how close a submarine commander had come to using a nuclear torpedo.
Arguments
- Soviet deployment was a defensive response to American missiles in Turkey and the Bay of Pigs invasion
- The missile gap heavily favored the U.S.; Cuba was a low-cost equalizer
- Khrushchev secured Cuba's territorial integrity and secret Jupiter removal (a substantive outcome, not a surrender)
- Arkhipov's veto was unknown to Moscow during the crisis, revealing how fragile command-and-control was on both sides
Sources
- Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament
- "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964
- In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents
vanquishedCuban
The Cubans
The third account belongs to the country the missiles were standing in, and it begins eighteen months earlier.
In April nineteen sixty one, fourteen hundred CIA trained exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion collapsed in three days, and it confirmed for Castro the thing he had been saying since nineteen fifty nine.
What followed confirmed it further. Operation Mongoose ran dozens of plans for sabotage, economic strangulation and assassination, signed off at the top of the American government.
So accepting Soviet missiles was, from Havana, not adventurism. It was a small country taking the only deterrent on offer.
“If they want this kind of confrontation, well, OK. We are ready.”
And then the deal was made without them. Castro learned that the missiles were leaving from a radio broadcast. The man whose soldiers had spent two weeks digging trenches along the northern coast, whose people would have died first, was told by Radio Moscow at the same time as everybody else.
The crowds in Havana chanted at Khrushchev that what you give, you cannot take away.
Read the full account
Narrative
Castro learned about the withdrawal from Radio Moscow. Khrushchev had not consulted him. The leader of the country where the missiles stood, whose population would bear the first strikes, whose soldiers had spent two weeks digging into trenches along the northern coast: this man was informed by a public broadcast. Castro smashed a mirror. He called Khrushchev's decision a betrayal. "Nikita, Nikita, what you give you cannot take away," crowds in Havana chanted.
Cuba's perspective begins with the Bay of Pigs. On April 17, 1961, 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Playa Giron. Castro personally directed the counterattack. The invasion collapsed in 72 hours, but it confirmed what Castro had argued since 1959: the United States would not accept a socialist state ninety miles from its shore. Operation Mongoose followed: 33 CIA plans for sabotage, assassination, and economic destabilization, approved at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration. Castro's acceptance of Soviet missiles was, in this light, an act of self-defense by a small nation against its imperial neighbor.
What the world calls the "Cuban Missile Crisis," Cuba calls the "October Crisis" (Crisis de Octubre). The distinction matters. From Havana, the crisis was not about missiles but about sovereignty. Cuba had the right to host any weapons it chose, just as Turkey hosted American Jupiters. The framing of Soviet missiles as "offensive" and American missiles as "defensive" struck Castro as the vocabulary of empire: the powerful define which weapons threaten and which protect.
On October 26, Castro sent Khrushchev the "Armageddon letter." In it, he urged the Soviet leader, in the event of a U.S. invasion, to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. At the 2002 Havana Conference, McNamara asked Castro directly: did he understand what a nuclear strike would have meant for Cuba? Castro replied that yes, he had understood Cuba would be destroyed. He had accepted that. "I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons," he said. "We would have been destroyed, but we would not have surrendered." McNamara called the exchange "the most chilling moment of the conference."
The resolution left Cuba with a guarantee (a U.S. pledge not to invade) but no seat at the table where the guarantee was negotiated. Castro refused to allow UN inspectors to verify missile removal, forcing Khrushchev to permit ship-deck inspections instead. Cuba kept Soviet IL-28 bombers for several additional weeks as leverage, then yielded under Moscow's pressure. The October Crisis taught Castro a lesson he would repeat for decades: small nations are always the currency in which great powers settle their debts.
Arguments
- Cuba was excluded from negotiations about weapons on its own soil, a violation of sovereignty
- The missile deployment was a legitimate defensive response to the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose
- American framing of Cuban-hosted missiles as "offensive" applied a double standard not applied to Jupiters in Turkey
- Castro's willingness to accept nuclear destruction rather than surrender reflected the depth of Cuban revolutionary commitment
Sources
- Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
- Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis
- Havana Conference transcripts, October 2002
- Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976
- Cuba: A New History
academicNuclear Deterrence Theory
The deterrence theorists
The fourth account turned the crisis into a discipline.
The influential reading is that deterrence did not hold because the two leaders were rational. It held because both of them became frightened of how little either of them controlled.
The useful phrase is the threat that leaves something to chance. Neither man could guarantee what his own forces would do next, and it was that, rather than any calculation, that moved them both.
Which points at the problem the theorists call always and never. A nuclear weapon has to be always available, or the threat is empty, and never usable by accident, or the threat kills you. On the twenty seventh both of those nearly failed inside the same afternoon.
One aircraft shot down by a local commander. One torpedo armed by a submarine captain who could not ask anyone.
Read the full account
Narrative
The crisis became the foundational case in nuclear deterrence theory, and every lesson drawn from it has been contested. Thomas Schelling's Arms and Influence (1966) used it to illustrate the "threat that leaves something to chance": neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev controlled every variable, and the risk of accidental escalation, not deliberate choice, was what ultimately compelled both to retreat. Rational deterrence worked not because leaders were rational, but because they were terrified of their own irrationality.
The crisis tested the foundational assumption of mutual assured destruction: that rational actors will not initiate nuclear war because the cost of retaliation exceeds any possible gain. Both leaders behaved broadly within this framework. But the near-misses of Black Saturday exposed what deterrence theorists call the "always/never" problem: nuclear weapons must always be available for use (to maintain credible deterrence) but must never be used accidentally or without authorization. On October 27, both conditions nearly failed simultaneously. Anderson's U-2 was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 battery whose commander acted without authorization from Moscow. Arkhipov's veto of the nuclear torpedo was not a systemic safeguard but a personal decision by one officer. A U-2 on a routine air-sampling mission over Alaska strayed into Soviet airspace on the same day; Soviet MiGs scrambled, and American F-102s, armed with nuclear-tipped Falcon missiles, launched to escort the U-2 home.
Graham Allison's Essence of Decision (1971) analyzed the crisis through three models: rational actor, organizational process, and bureaucratic politics. The rational-actor model explains the broad shape of the outcome. But the organizational model explains why the quarantine line was drawn farther from Cuba than Kennedy ordered (the Navy placed it where standard operating procedure dictated), and why the Air Force prepared for 500 bombing sorties when Kennedy had approved only surgical strikes against missile sites. The bureaucratic model explains why different agencies offered different intelligence estimates of Soviet intentions.
The institutional aftermath was concrete. The hotline agreement of June 1963 addressed the communication gap: during the crisis, messages between Kennedy and Khrushchev took up to twelve hours to encode, transmit, and decode. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of August 1963 moved both powers toward arms control. The crisis also produced a paradox that defined the next three decades: both superpowers drew the lesson that nuclear arsenals must be expanded to prevent the vulnerability that invited the crisis in the first place. By 1986, the combined stockpile reached 70,000 warheads, the apotheosis of a logic born in thirteen October days.
Arguments
- The crisis demonstrated that deterrence works through shared terror, not rational calculation
- Near-misses on Black Saturday exposed fatal gaps in command-and-control on both sides
- Organizational behavior and bureaucratic politics distorted the decisions of rational leaders
- The crisis paradoxically accelerated arms buildup even as it catalyzed arms control
Sources
- Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Arms and Influence
- The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
revisionistDeclassified Revisionist
The declassified record
The fifth account is what happened when the files opened, and it is the reason the other four had to be rewritten.
Kennedy had secretly recorded the Cabinet Room. When those tapes were released, the president on them was not the cool figure of the official story. He is uncertain. He doubles back. He pushes against the generals out of fear of where their plan ends, not out of serene judgement.
The committee is less deliberative too. Men repeat themselves, talk past each other, and work from intelligence that is wrong.
Soviet archives added the rest. The tactical warheads already on the island, which nobody in Washington had counted. The submarine. And the Turkish trade, which had been kept secret so successfully that for a generation the lesson taught from this crisis was that firmness works and concession is unnecessary.
The record says a concession was made. It was simply not announced.
Read the full account
Narrative
For thirty years, the Cuban Missile Crisis was understood through a narrative shaped by the Kennedy administration: Soviet aggression met by American resolve, a young president staring down a reckless adversary, the world saved by steady nerves. This narrative began unraveling in the late 1980s when Soviet archives opened and American documents were declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. By the 2002 Havana Conference, almost every major assumption of the original story had been revised.
The Kennedy tapes, secretly recorded by a system JFK had installed in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, were declassified in stages through the 1990s. They revealed a president far less certain than the public narrative suggested. Kennedy agonized. He second-guessed his own judgment. He pushed back against the hawks not from cool conviction but from genuine fear of where airstrikes would lead. The tapes also revealed that ExComm was less deliberative than Robert Kennedy's memoir portrayed: members repeated positions, talked past each other, and sometimes operated on faulty intelligence. The CIA overestimated the timeline for missile readiness in some briefings and underestimated it in others.
The Soviet revelations were more dramatic. At the 1992 Havana Conference (a predecessor to the 2002 event), General Anatoli Gribkov revealed that 162 tactical nuclear warheads were in Cuba during the crisis, a fact unknown to Washington at the time. These included warheads for Luna (FROG) rockets with a range of 31 miles, intended for use against an amphibious invasion force. Soviet field commanders had pre-delegated authority to use them. Had Kennedy ordered the invasion that the Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended, American troops landing on Cuban beaches would have walked into tactical nuclear fire. The escalation from there is difficult to model and impossible to contain.
Arkhipov's story did not enter public knowledge until 2002. The details came from Soviet naval archives and from interviews with surviving crew members of B-59. The submarine had been submerged for days, air conditioning had failed, temperatures inside exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, CO2 levels were dangerously high, and crew members were fainting. Captain Savitsky, believing the depth charges were real attacks, not signals to surface, concluded that war had already begun. Arkhipov's authority to override came solely from his rank as flotilla commander; he happened to be aboard B-59 rather than one of the other three submarines.
The revisionist synthesis holds that the crisis was resolved not by American superiority or Soviet capitulation, but by mutual concession driven by mutual terror. Both sides made substantive concessions. Both sides kept concessions secret from their own publics. The resolution was not a triumph of deterrence theory but a near-failure of it: deterrence held by individual human judgment (Arkhipov), not by systemic design. The closest the world came to nuclear war was not a decision by Kennedy or Khrushchev. It was a moment on a submarine where one officer disagreed with two others.
Arguments
- Declassified tapes show Kennedy was far less confident and ExComm far less deliberative than the public narrative suggested
- 162 tactical nuclear warheads in Cuba, with pre-delegated authority, meant an invasion would have triggered nuclear battlefield use
- Arkhipov's veto was a single point of failure; one officer's judgment, not systemic design, prevented nuclear launch
- The crisis was resolved through mutual concession, not American dominance. Both sides gave ground and hid it from their publics
Sources
- The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader
- One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
- Havana Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis (transcripts)
The turn
And what each of them is leaving out.
The American account leaves out the deal. For thirty years it was a story about nerve, told by people who knew that a trade had been made and had agreed never to say so.
From the record
Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose as provocations that motivated Soviet deploymentJupiter missiles in Turkey as the mirror image of Soviet missiles in CubaCuba excluded from all negotiations about its own territoryKennedy's domestic political calculations in an election yearThe Soviet account presents the deployment as symmetry, which it was, and skips how much of it was a gamble on not being seen, and what it meant to move that many warheads onto an island whose government did not have a say over their use.
From the record
Deception of Operation Anadyr and its violation of Khrushchev's assurances to KennedyCastro's exclusion from negotiations and his fury at the withdrawalKhrushchev's domestic political damage and eventual removalThe 162 tactical nuclear warheads deployed without Washington's knowledgeThe Cuban account is the most morally clear and the least in control. It is an argument about sovereignty made by the one party that was not at the table when the thing was settled.
From the record
Castro's Armageddon letter urging first strike, which would have destroyed Cuba itselfSoviet tactical nuclear warheads that Cuba had no control overCuba's subsequent military dependence on the Soviet Union for three decadesDomestic repression accelerated under the justification of external threatThe deterrence account is a theory that survives by absorbing its own near misses. A framework that has to count Arkhipov as evidence of stability is doing a lot of work.
From the record
Human experience of the crisis (public fear, Cuban civilian perspective)Moral dimensions of threatening the annihilation of millionsThird World perspective on superpower nuclear brinkmanshipDomestic political pressures on both Kennedy and KhrushchevAnd the declassified account has the advantage every later reader has. It knows how it came out. Nobody in those rooms did.
From the record
The genuine difficulty of Kennedy's position and the courage required to resist military pressureKhrushchev's sincere desire to protect Cuba from another Bay of PigsThe institutional reforms that did follow and did reduce future riskCastro's agency and strategic logic, not merely his radicalism
Close
The direct line between Washington and Moscow was installed the following summer, because the crisis had been conducted partly through public broadcasts and partly through a journalist.
A test ban treaty followed in nineteen sixty three, and a non proliferation treaty five years later.
Vasili Arkhipov went back to the Soviet navy, was promoted, retired as a vice admiral, and died in nineteen ninety eight, before almost anybody outside his own service knew what he had done.
He was not being brave. By his own account he was following the rules, which happened to require three signatures, and he did not give his.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 13 days
- Killed
- 1Major Rudolf Anderson, U-2 pilot shot down October 27
- Displaced
- 100MEntire world population at nuclear risk; estimated…
- Place
- Cuba
Key figures
- John F. KennedyPresident of the United States, chaired ExComm deliberations1917 to 1963
- Nikita KhrushchevFirst Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ordered missile deployment1894 to 1971
- Fidel CastroPrime Minister of Cuba, urged Soviet first strike1926 to 2016
- Vasili ArkhipovSoviet Navy flotilla commander, vetoed nuclear torpedo launch on submarine B-591926 to 1998
- Robert F. KennedyU.S. Attorney General, led secret back-channel negotiations with Dobrynin1925 to 1968
- Anatoly DobryninSoviet Ambassador to the United States, back-channel intermediary1919 to 2010
- Curtis LeMayU.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, advocated airstrikes and invasion1906 to 1990
- Adlai StevensonU.S. Ambassador to the UN, confronted Soviet delegation with U-2 photographs1900 to 1965
Primary sources
· Remark to McGeorge Bundy, October 24, 1962 · October 24, 1962
“We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
· Letter to Bertrand Russell, October 24, 1962 · October 24, 1962
“I will tell you one thing. Nuclear war is out of the question. We're not lunatics.”
· Public address, Havana, October 23, 1962 · October 23, 1962
“If they want this kind of confrontation, well, OK. We are ready.”
· Remark to aide Kenny O'Donnell, October 27, 1962 · October 27, 1962
“It is insane and very sad that two men sitting on opposite sides of the world should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.”
Threads
- The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki66,000 dead in 8.5 seconds. Seven of eight five-star American generals said it wasn’t necessary.
- The Cuban RevolutionThe revolution's turn to Moscow and the seizure of U.S. property brought Soviet nuclear missiles to the island in October 1962. The Bay of Pigs failure in April 1961 was the direct rehearsal that convinced Castro to accept them
- September 11 and the War on TerrorNineteen men with box cutters turned the world’s most powerful military against two countries that didn’t attack it.