The Full Picture: Warheads Already There, the Deal Nobody Told You

The Question Nobody Asked

On the twenty-seventh of October, nineteen sixty-two, three Soviet officers sat inside a disabled submarine being depth-charged by American destroyers. They believed a war had already started above them.

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The Photographs That Started It

Thirteen days before that moment in the submarine, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft completed a routine overflight of western Cuba. The date was October fourteenth.

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What Washington Didn't Know

While ExComm deliberated, they were working with incomplete information. Significantly incomplete.

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The Quarantine

ExComm debated the options hard. The Joint Chiefs wanted an immediate air strike followed by an invasion.

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Two Letters from Moscow

Khrushchev's response came in a complicated form. He sent two letters in rapid succession that said different things.

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The Day the U-2 Went Down

October twenty-seventh was also the day Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. flew his U-2 over Cuba and didn't come back. His aircraft was shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile.

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The Submarine and the Man Who Said No

Now back to the submarine. Because this is the part of the story that history came closest to burying entirely.

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What the History Books Got Wrong

There's another layer to this that's worth being clear about. The dominant public narrative of the Cuban Missile Crisis was shaped largely by Robert Kennedy's memoir, "Thirteen Days," published after his assassination in nineteen sixty-eight.

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The Okinawa Problem

One more piece of the information gap deserves mention. Kennedy learned during the crisis that the United States had secretly deployed nuclear missiles in Okinawa since nineteen sixty-one.

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The Men Nobody Thanked

The title of this episode isn't rhetorical. There really were men who saved the world, and they really weren't thanked.

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