A Near Miss

Abstract

By any measure, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 must rank not only as the single most dangerous moment of the Cold War, but, in the apt words of Sheldon M. Stem, as one of the most perilous moments in human (p. xix). The crisis brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any other point during the atomic era. That inescapable conclusion has been confirmed by the wealth of documentary and oral history evidence made available over the past decade. It is further buttressed by Averting 'The Final Failure', the latest entry in the swelling scholarly corpus on the Cold War's closest brush with catastrophe. Scholars have been drawn to this epic Soviet-American confrontation as moths to a flame, fascinated equally by the human miscalculations that precipitated so perilous a showdown and by the high-stakes deliberations in Washington and Moscow that ultimately averted a nuclear exchange that could have claimed tens of millions of lives. They have created a small library of monographs, articles, participants' reflections, review essays, and documentary compilations, parsing every aspect of the crisis that began on October 14, with the discovery by U.S. intelligence of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba, and that ended with the Soviet-American diplomatic bargain of October 28. That bargain, in essence, sanctioned the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade the island and a U.S. commitment to withdraw its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The earliest work on the Cuban missile crisis suffered from limited access