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October 27: The Day the World Almost Ended
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the single most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U-2 was shot down, a Soviet submarine nearly launched a nuclear torpedo, and a secret deal was being struck that no one would admit to for decades. This is the chapter where every thread of the crisis converged — and somehow didn't detonate.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of October sixteen, nineteen sixty-two, John F. Kennedy sat down with his most senior advisors and learned something that no American president had ever been told.
The U-2 photographs were taken on October fourteenth. Two days passed before Kennedy saw them.
Kennedy announced the naval blockade, which the administration carefully called a quarantine for legal reasons, on October twenty-second. The distinction mattered.
On October twenty-sixth, Nikita Khrushchev sent Kennedy a message. It was long, personal in tone, and it offered a way out.
October twenty-seventh was, without question, the most dangerous single day of the crisis. It produced two events that each carried the potential for nuclear war.
Deep beneath the Atlantic, roughly thirty miles south of Cuba, a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine designated B-59 had been running for days without surfacing. American naval forces had located it.
That brings the information problem back into sharp focus. ExComm was making decisions about how hard to press the naval quarantine, whether to authorize low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba, and whether a Soviet attack on a U-2 required military retaliation, all without knowing that one hundred and forty nuclear warheads were already inside Cuba.
The crisis formally resolved on October twenty-eighth when Khrushchev announced the Soviet Union would dismantle and remove the missiles from Cuba. The public version was a clean American victory.
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