The Cuban Missile Crisis: Once More Unto the Breach

Abstract

The Cuban missile crisis continues to inspire books and attract readers both because it was the most terrifying face-off of the Cold War and because the release of new evidence has repeatedly compelled historians to reassess those harrowing thirteen days. Into the 1980s, most of the evidence on the crisis came from U.S. sources, but scholars were nonetheless unable to nail down specifics about the secret discussions in the White House and knew even less about events in the Kremlin and Havana. However, three new mines of evidence have since been opened: the tape recordings of the ExComm meetings, publications from a series of international conferences of missile crisis participants and scholars, and archival materials from the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who covered the collapse of the USSR and is fluent in Russian, found that many key Soviet archives remain closed. He also discovered that the records of the Strategic Air Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are still severely restricted. Cuban archives, of course, are completely inaccessible. I was able to overcome these obstacles, he maintains, triangulating information from very disparate sources, in English, Russian, and Spanish (p. 355). He also studied many previously overlooked photos and records and interviewed more than a hundred missile crisis veterans in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Cuba (p. 357). Most of the book deals with one day Black Saturday, October 27, 1962 without doubt the most perilous day of the Cold War if not in all of human history. Dobbs takes the reader directly into the thoughts and actions of American, Soviet, and Cuban leaders and especially into the gut-wrenching fear and confusion experienced by Soviet combat and technical support forces in Cuba. His most important conclusion, that humankind was fortunate to have restrained and rational leaders like Kennedy and Khrushchev in charge at this potentially apocalyptic moment, is certainly not new. But, nonetheless,