In October 1962, the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba. What followed was a thirteen day confrontation in which decisions made in Washington, Moscow and Havana raised the possibility of nuclear war - and made the abstract Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction feel terrifyingly real.
In this first episode of The Cuban Missile Crisis: 13 Days to Prevent Disaster, I examine how the world reached this point. From the emergence of the Cold War and nuclear arms race to the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro’s confrontation with the United States, the Bay of Pigs and Cuba’s developing relationship with Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.
At the centre of the story is John F. Kennedy, a young president confronting Soviet missiles only 90 miles from the United States while facing intense pressure from military figures advocating a far more aggressive response. With nuclear weapons transforming the consequences of any miscalculation, this was a crisis in which escalation could potentially mean something unprecedented: a war from which there might be no meaningful victory. The episode explores why the nuclear dimension made the confrontation fundamentally different from the wars that had preceded it.
From Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro to Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Che Guevara, this episode explores the personalities, ideologies and competing interests behind the confrontation - and asks how American intervention in Cuba, Soviet fears for Castro’s government and the wider struggle for Cold War power brought the superpowers to the brink.
Finally, we reach 22 October 1962: Kennedy’s televised address revealing the missiles to the American public and announcing a naval “quarantine” of Cuba. The secret confrontation was now a global crisis. The question was no longer how the missiles had reached Cuba, but whether they could be removed without starting World War Three.
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