3 minutes to midnight cuban missile crisis

One of the fields contained tubelike objects, others oval-shaped white dots neatly lined up next to one another. On superficial inspection, the grainy images of fields, forests, and winding country roads seemed innocuous, almost bucolic.

The photographs had been shot from directly overhead, evidently from a considerable distance, with the aid of a very powerful zoom lens. The secret was buried in three black-and-white photographs pasted to briefing boards hidden in a large black case. Arthur Lundahl held a pointer in his hand, ready to reveal a secret that would bring the world to the edge of nuclear war. The Central Intelligence Agency's chief photo interpreter hovered over the president's shoulder. 'And he was determined that if the world had to face a nuclear war, there would be very, very clear reasons for fighting it that could be explained to ordinary Americans, and a few obsolete missiles in Turkey was not sufficient reason for him to go to war.' 'The thing that struck him about that book was that nobody really understood why the world was plunged into war in 1914,' says Dobbs. Kennedy's efforts at tactical diplomacy were inspired in part by Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, which details the origins of the First World War: military to remove missiles from Turkey, but when tensions flared with the Soviets, he used those missiles as a bargaining tool. 'There was no risk of an American interception of a Soviet missile-carrying freighter.'īefore the crisis in Cuba, Kennedy had been trying to get the U.S.

and I found out they were 400 to 500 nautical miles apart at this moment,' says Dobbs. 'I was the first researcher to actually plot the positions of Soviet and American warships. In another well-known incident, Kennedy's secretary of state, Dean Rusk, famously remarked on the United States' naval blockage of Cuba, saying, 'We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.' But Dobbs says that Rusk's boast is 'based on myth': On what Dobbs calls 'the most dangerous day of the Cold War,' an American U-2 pilot flying on a routine reconnaissance mission to the North Pole was blinded by the Aurora Borealis and stumbled over the Soviet Union - an event that, Khrushchev told Kennedy the next day, could have resulted in a nuclear exchange between the two countries. 'They were both trying to get out of this terrible mess that they had, in part, helped to create.'ĭobbs says the real risk of nuclear war came not from the American or Soviet heads of state, but from the 'chance events that happen when you put the machinery of war into motion.' In researching the book, 'I really came to the conclusion that, particularly toward the end of the crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were pretty much on the same side,' Dobbs tells Robert Siegel. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, Michael Dobbs, author of the new book One Minute to Midnight, says that the two leaders were actually of like minds when it came to the threat of nuclear war. Though much was made of the conflagration between John F.

3 minutes to midnight cuban missile crisis