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The Cuban Missile Crisis: The 13 Days That Almost Ended the World (Sleep Story) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History, the show where we drift backward through time, one careful detail at a time.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going back to the autumn of 1962 to 13 days in October when the planet came closer to nuclear war than it ever had before and closer than it ever has since.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the Cuban missile crisis.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about fear and patience, and a handful of tired men in windowless rooms trying very hard not to end the world.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing frightening about hearing it now.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: All these decades later, safely on the other side of how it ended.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, let's begin.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1 The Beginning
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the morning of October 16, 1962, a Tuesday in Washington, the nation's capital.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The autumn air outside the White House is cool and a little damp.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of morning where the grass on the south lawn is still silver with dew long after sunrise.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the Oval Office, the heavy curtains have been pulled back and pale gray light is falling across the carpet in long rectangles.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is at his desk, working through the ordinary business of the day.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: When his national security adviser, a quiet, precise man named MacGeorge Bundy, asks for a few minutes of his time.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bundy is carrying a folder.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the folder are photographs, dozens of them, grainy and grey, and taken from an altitude of more than 14 miles above the earth.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were captured the day before by a United States U2 reconnaissance plane, a long, fragile, glider-like aircraft that flies so high it can barely be detected.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Piloted by a man trained to memorize the geography of an entire country from a single pass overhead.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plane had been flying over western Cuba, over fields and hillsides not far from the small town of San Cristobal.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: at the National Photographic Interpretation Center could not quite believe at first.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long canvas covered trailers, cylindrical fuel tanks, strange star-shaped clearings cut into the fields where none had been before.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: to an untrained eye, the photographs might have looked like almost nothing, a smear of pale shapes against dark green countryside.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to the analysts who had spent years studying Soviet military equipment from the air, the shapes were unmistakable.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were medium-range ballistic missiles, the kind capable of carrying a nuclear warhead more than 1,000 miles.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cuba sits roughly 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: From those fields outside San Christopher, a missile could reach the nation's capital in under 13 minutes.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It could reach most of the eastern United States before any alarm had finished sounding.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bundy lays the photograph out, one by one, across the low table in front of the President's desk.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no shouting in the room.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: there is no dramatic gasp.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: People who were present that morning would later describe something quieter and stranger than panic, a kind of cold, sinking stillness, as though the temperature in the room had dropped by 10 degrees.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy leans forward, looks at the grainy gray shapes for a long moment, and asks the question that will define the next 13 days of his presidency,
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: How long do we have before these missiles are operational?
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody in the room has a confident answer.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Best estimates suggest perhaps 10 days.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe less.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to leave President Kennedy there in that gray morning light.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Staring down at the photographs that will not leave his mind for the next two weeks.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we follow him, any further into the crisis itself.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to rewind the tape a little.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back through the months and years that led to this moment.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because nothing about October 16th happened in isolation.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand why the Soviet Union secretly shipped nuclear missiles onto a small island in the Caribbean.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and why the president of the United States felt that this single discovery was worth the risk of provoking a third-world war.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have to understand three things, a botched invasion, a humiliating defeat, and a quiet, lopsided imbalance of fear that had been building for years.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's go back to the spring of 1961, about a year and a half before those photographs landed on the president's desk.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of that year, a force of roughly 1,400 Cuban exiles trained and funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency landed on the southern coast of Cuba at a place called The Bay of Pigs.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plan inherited from the previous administration and approved with some hesitation by the newly inaugurated President Kennedy was for this small army of exiles to establish a beach head, spark up popular uprising against the island's young revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro and topple his government within days.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not go anything like that.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The invasion force was outnumbered, poorly supported, and almost immediately surrounded by Castro's forces who had been expecting some kind of attack, and were better prepared than American planners had assumed.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Promised American Air Support, crucial to the invasion's survival, was scaled back and then withdrawn at the last moment, partly because Kennedy
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: wary of dragging the United States into open, undeniable conflict with Cuba, refused to authorise the additional air strikes that military planners said were necessary.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within 72 hours, the invasion had collapsed entirely.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 100 of the exile fighters were killed, and over 1000 were captured and marched off to Cuban prisons.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by any measure, a humiliating disaster for the young Kennedy administration, barely three months into office.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the consequences ran deeper than simple embarrassment.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs was proof of something he already suspected, that the United States was determined to remove him from power by any means necessary and that it would very likely try again.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time with greater force.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: For President Kennedy, the failure left a bitter taste and a desire to prove.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: to his own military advisers and to the watching world that he was not a weak or hesitant leader, a perception that would weigh heavily on his decisions 18 months later.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And quietly behind the scenes, the central intelligence agency did not give up on removing Castro.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout 1961 and 1962, a covert program known as Operation Mongoose ran sabotage missions, assassination plots, and intelligence operations aimed squarely at toppling the Cuban government.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: all of which Castro and his allies in Moscow were well aware of, even if the American public was not.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by the autumn of 1962, sitting in Havana, Fidel Castro had every reason to believe that an American invasion of his island was not a paranoid fantasy, but a matter of time.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had survived one attempt already.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fully expected another larger one to follow.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: This fear, more than almost anything else, is what set the stage for what came next.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let's travel briefly to Moscow to understand the second piece of the puzzle, the perspective of Soviet Premier Nikita Krushov.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1962, Kruschev was the leader of a superpower that, on paper, looked formidable.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in the specific arithmetic of nuclear weapons, was significantly behind the United States.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: American intelligence estimates at the time suggested the United States possessed somewhere in the range of five times as many deliverable nuclear warheads as the Soviet Union.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And crucially,
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States had something the Soviets did not.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Intercontinental ballistic missiles and forward bases positioned close enough to Soviet territory to strike with very little warning.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most pointedly, the United States had recently placed a number of Jupiter intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: sharing a border with the Soviet Union.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: From Turkish soil, those Jupiter missiles could reach major Soviet cities, including Moscow itself, in a matter of minutes.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: To cruisechev, this felt like an enormous and unfair imbalance.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A gun held to the head of the Soviet Union from a distance of a few hundred miles.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the Soviet Union's own missiles, far less advanced and based
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cruschef complained about this publicly and privately for years.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted some way to level the playing field.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: To give the United States a small taste of the vulnerability, the Soviet Union had been living with.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, Cruschef had become genuinely concerned about Cuba itself.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: both as a fledgling ally worth protecting, and as a useful piece on the larger chessboard of the Cold War.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Castro's Cuba was the first openly communist state in the western hemisphere, a tremendous propaganda victory for the Soviet Union, and Kruschev did not want to see it crushed by an American invasion.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way Hungary's uprising had been crushed by Soviet tanks
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Protecting Cuba and simultaneously closing the missile gap with the United States suddenly seemed to cruise-chef, like two problems, with a single, audacious solution.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1962, cruise-chev began quietly developing a plan to secretly ship nuclear-capable missiles to Cuba, close enough to strike most of the continental United States, and to do it without American intelligence noticing.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: until the missiles were fully operational and impossible to dislodge through anything short of war.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plan was given a deliberately bland, almost bureaucratic codename, Operation Anadar, named after a remote river and town in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, chosen specifically to mislead anyone who intercepted the name into thinking the operation
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The secrecy involved in Operation Anadir was extraordinary, even by cold war standards.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet soldiers and technicians boarding the ships bound for Cuba were told only that they were heading somewhere cold and were issued winter coats and skis as a deliberate cover story.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Despite their actual destination being a tropical climate that would make those winter clothes almost comically useless.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many were not told their true destination until the ships were already well out at sea.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: cargo holes were reconfigured to disguise missile components as agricultural equipment.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet officers travelled under false identities.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the summer of 1962, more than 80 ships made the crossing from Soviet ports to Cuban Harbers, carrying not just medium-range ballistic missiles, but also intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching even farther into the United States, along with nuclear warheads, support troops.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and surface-to-wear missile systems intended to shoot down any reconnaissance aircraft that came to close.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an enormous logistical undertaking, and for months it worked.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: American intelligence agencies picked up scattered hints throughout the summer, increased shipping traffic.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: unusual construction projects glimpsed from low altitude flights.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Refugee reports of strange equipment moving through the Cuban countryside, but no single piece of evidence was conclusive enough to prove that nuclear weapons were involved.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not until that U-2 flight on October 14th.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two days before Bundy walked into the Oval Office with his folder of photographs that the picture finally became unmistakable.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is the fuse, laid out piece by piece, a failed invasion that convinced Castro and American attack was inevitable.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: a covert sabotage campaign that kept his fear alive.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Soviet leader frustrated by a lopsided nuclear balance and eager to protect a valuable ally, and a secret operation, audacious in scale, and almost successful in its deception, that placed nuclear weapons within easy striking distance of nearly every major city in the United States.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three men now stand at the center of this story, each seeing the crisis from a completely different angle.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Kennedy, only 45 years old, still carrying the political wound of the Bay of Pigs, surrounded by military advisers, who, almost to a man, believe the only sensible response to nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida is immediate overwhelming military force.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: gambling everything on a secret deployment that was always going to be discovered eventually.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, facing the question of how far he is willing to go to defend what he has built, and how to back down, if backing down becomes necessary, without looking weak to his own generals and to the rest of the world.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Fidel Castro, watching nervously from Havana, increasingly aware that the missiles meant to protect his revolution might also be the very thing that finally provokes the invasion he has feared since the Bay of Pigs, and equally aware that the decisions being made about his country's fate are being made almost entirely without him.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: in conversations between Washington and Moscow that do not include Havana at all.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those three men and their three very different fears now in place, we can return to that grey October morning in the Oval Office, and follow day by day, the 13 days that the history books would come to call the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, the 13 days of brinkmanship,
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the next 13 days, a small, exhausted group of men would meet, again and again, sometimes twice a day, in a windowless conference room at the White House.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later, in the cabinet room, trying to decide how the most powerful nation on Earth should respond to nuclear missiles appearing in its own backyard.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Kennedy gave this group a formal name, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, but almost everyone simply called it by its short, Clipped Nickname, Ex-Kong.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had no official legal standing.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was simply, whoever the President decided he wanted in the room, a rotating cast of roughly 15 advisors that included his brother, and attorney general Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and a shifting collection of generals, diplomats, and intelligence officials.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you find your mind drifting in and out over the next stretch of this story, that is completely fine.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shape of it matters more than every individual name and meeting.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you need to hold on to is this.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: For 13 days, a small group of tired men sat in a room, disagreeing with each other, while the world outside had no idea any of it was happening.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can break those 13 days into four loose movements, a week of total secrecy, while the options were debated.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single dramatic evening when the secret was finally revealed to the world, a tense standoff at sea, and one almost unbearable Saturday that very nearly tipped everything into catastrophe.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's take them in order, slowly.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first movement runs from the discovery on October 16th through about October 21st, six days during which X-COM met in near total secrecy.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president kept his public schedule almost entirely normal during this stretch.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: attending a previously planned trip to the Midwest, posing for photographs, behaving as though nothing at all was wrong, specifically, so that the Soviets would have no reason to suspect their missiles had already been discovered.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Behind closed doors, however,
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The conversation in that room was anything, but normal.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: From nearly the first meeting, the military members of XCOM led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and most forcefully by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Lamay, argued for an immediate and overwhelming air strike against the missile sites, followed quickly by a full invasion of Cuba.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their reasoning was straightforward from a purely military standpoint.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The missiles were not yet operational.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a narrow window in which they could be destroyed before they became a genuine threat.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And any delay only gave the Soviets more time to finish installing them and arm them with warheads.
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Amée, in particular, pushed hard and repeatedly for immediate action.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point comparing Kennedy's hesitation to the appeasement of fascist powers before the Second World War, a comparison that visibly angered the president without changing his mind.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy resisted the air strike option from very early on, and his resistance came from a fear that ran deeper than simple caution.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He understood, with a clarity, that many of his military advisers seem not to share, that an American attack on Cuba, even a supposedly limited one, aimed only at the missile sites, would almost certainly kill Soviet soldiers stationed at those sites, soldiers whose deaths the Soviet Union could not simply absorb without some kind of response.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy worried aloud, in taped conversations from those meetings that survived to this day, about a chain reaction, an American strike on Cuba, leading to a Soviet response somewhere else in the world.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps against West Berlin, the small, isolated, democratic, on-clave, deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany that had long been one of the most fragile pressure points of the entire Cold War.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Soviet move against Berlin might draw in the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which could draw in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and within days, a localised strike on a few missile sites in Cuba could spiral into a full-scale war between the two nuclear superpowers, for not just over Cuba, but across Europe and potentially everywhere else.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This fear of escalation.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: of one small action triggering an uncontrollable chain of larger and larger responses became the quiet, constant, undercurrent, running beneath nearly every decision Kennedy made over the following two weeks.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not simply weighing the missiles in Cuba against doing nothing.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was weighing every possible American response against the question of where that response might lead, three steps and four steps down the line, in a way that many of his more hawkish advisers focused tightly on the immediate military problem in front of them did not seem to be doing.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of those first six days, X-COM worked through option after option.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: A full invasion was considered and largely set aside for the moment.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Partly because intelligence estimates suggested it would take far longer to organize than the situation allowed, and partly because nobody could say with confidence.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: What the Soviet stationed in Cuba might do in response to an outright invasion of the island.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A surgical air strike against only the missile science was debated extensively, championed by some of the president's advisers as a middle path between doing nothing and full invasion, but ultimately set aside as well.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both because military planners admitted
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: they could not guarantee destroying every missile in a single strike, and because, again, the deaths of Soviet personnel in such a strike seemed almost certain to provoke a serious Soviet response somewhere in the world.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, almost reluctantly, the group converged on a different idea entirely.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: a naval blockade of Cuba intended to prevent any further Soviet ships from delivering additional missiles, warheads, or military equipment to the island.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was an immediate problem with calling it a blockade, however.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under international law, a blockade is technically an act of war.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: something that would give the Soviet Union legal grounds to respond with force of its own.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: To work around this, the administration settled on a different word entirely.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: One carefully chosen by Kennedy's lawyers and advisors for its softer, more defensive connotation.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: A quarantine.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word was meant to suggest something protective and limited, rather than aggressive.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way a doctor might quarantine a patient to stop a disease from spreading, rather than blockading a port to choke off an enemy.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a small linguistic distinction, but in the delicate diplomatic dance that was about to unfold, small distinctions like this one would matter enormously.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: As these six days of secret debate war on, the members of Xcom began to informally sought themselves into two loose camps, nicknames that have stuck in the history books ever since, the Hawks and the Doves.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Hawks, a group that included most of the senior military leadership, along with a handful of civilian advisors, consistently pushed for the most forceful options available.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: arguing that hesitation would only be read by Moscow as weakness, and that weakness invited further aggression down the road.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The doves, a group that included defence secretary Robert McNamara for much of the crisis, along with Robert Kennedy and a number of the more diplomatically minded advisors, consistently pushed back toward the quarantine option and away from anything resembling a first strike.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: arguing that the risks of escalation was simply too severe to gamble with.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: No matter how tempting a quick, decisive military solution might look on paper.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not abstract philosophical positions debated calmly over coffee.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tape's Kennedy secretly recorded of these meetings, declassified decades later, capture men raising their voices, interrupting one another, circling back to the same arguments again and again across many hours, visibly exhausted and under tremendous strain, several of them
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had entered the crisis with a reputation as a coldly analytical, numbers-driven secretary of defence, emerged as one of the most consistent voices for caution throughout the entire 13 days, repeatedly steering conversations back toward the question of what a given action would actually accomplish, and what it would risk in return, rather than what it might feel satisfying to do in the moment.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert Kennedy, for his part, kept returning to a phrase that seemed to weigh on him more than almost any other consideration.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not want history to remember the United States as the country that solved a missile crisis by launching a surprise attack.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reminiscent, in his own words, of the way Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: without warning two decades earlier.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: That single comparison made quietly in one of the early meetings.
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is often credited with helping tip the conversation away from any kind of unannounced strike and toward the more public, more deliberate quarantine option instead.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: By October 20th, the decision had essentially been made.
• 25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: the United States would not strike first.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would establish a naval quarantine around Cuba.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Publicly reveal the missiles to the world and demand their removal.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: While keeping the option of further military action firmly on the table, if the quarantine failed to resolve the crisis, all that remained was for the president to tell the American public and the rest of the world what had been happening just off the coast of Florida.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That brings us to the second movement, a single evening.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: October 22, 1962.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout that Monday, in a coordinated diplomatic effort happening in near total secrecy, American ambassadors and officials around the world were quietly briefing key allies just hours before the news became public.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: British Prime Minister Harald Macmillan was informed, the leaders of France and West Germany were informed.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoli Dobrinin, was summoned to the State Department and handed a copy of the speech the president was about to deliver, along with a private letter from Kennedy to Kruschev, just a short time before the broadcast began.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Moscow, Soviet officials reportedly scrambled to understand exactly what the Americans now knew and what they intended to do about it.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Kennedy sat behind a small desk in front of television cameras and spoke directly to the American people in a tone that was, by design, calm, measured and grave all at once.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He revealed for the first time that the Soviet Union had secretly placed offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, capable of striking most of the major cities of the Western Hemisphere.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He announced the Naval quarantine.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: set to begin within 48 hours to prevent any additional offensive military equipment from reaching the island.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he stated, in language, deliberately left somewhat open to interpretation that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the western hemisphere would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union against the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response against
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the roughly 100 million Americans watching or listening that evening, the broadcast landed like a sudden drop in temperature across the entire country.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within hours, grocery stores in cities up and down the east coast reported runs on canned goods, bottled water and flashlight batteries.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sales of backyard fallout shelters already a strange minor industry throughout the 1950s and early 1960s
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spiked overnight, schoolchildren who had already been drilled for years in the now familiar routine of ducking under their desks during air raid drills were told with varying degrees of honesty from the adults around them that this might be the real thing.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: college campuses held all night vigils.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Florida, residents living closest to Cuba watched military convoys roll past their homes for days heading toward bases along the coastline.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost immediately following the President's address, the United States military raised its readiness level to what is known as DEFCOM 3, a system with five total levels, indicating how close
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: with Defcon 5, representing the most relaxed, peace time posture and Defcon 1, representing maximum readiness for imminent or ongoing nuclear war.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Defcon 3 meant air force units, increasing their alert status, additional aircraft armed and ready, and a noticeable visible mobilization that anyone near a major air base could see and hear happening around them.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Moscow, Krushchev received the news of Kennedy's speech, with what witnesses described as genuine shock, not so much that the missiles had been discovered since that possibility had always existed, but at how quickly and forcefully the Americans had chosen to respond.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet leadership had apparently miscalculated how Kennedy would react.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Assuming he would either not discover the missiles until they were already fully operational and impossible to remove, or that if he did discover them, he would respond through quiet diplomatic channels rather than a dramatic public address watched by the entire world.
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither assumption held up, and cruisechev now found himself needing to decide in real time in front of a global audience, how the Soviet Union would respond to a public American challenge.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: That brings us into the third movement of these 13 days.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The standoff at sea, running roughly from October 24th through October 25th.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American quarantine line was drawn in a wide
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: patrolled by dozens of United States Navy ships with orders to stop and inspect any vessel heading toward Cuba suspected of carrying offensive military equipment and to turn back any ship that refused inspection.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the quarantine officially took effect on the morning of October 24th, more than 20 Soviet cargo ships were known to be on route toward Cuba, somewhere out on the
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: or what their captains had been instructed to do if challenged.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a 10th stretch of hours that morning, several of those ships continued steaming directly toward the quarantine line, without any sign of slowing down.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Naval officers and ex-conmembers alike watched plotted positions on a map in Washington with a kind of helpless dread, waiting to see whether the United States Navy was about to be forced into an open confrontation at sea with Soviet vessels.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: an event that could very easily become the spark that ignited everything else.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Secretary of State Dean Rusk watching the same reports is remembered for turning to a colleague and saying simply that the two of them were eyeball to eyeball with the other fellow, and the other fellow had just blinked.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: After intelligence reports began showing that a number of the Soviet ships, including several believed to be carrying missile-related cargo, had slowed, stopped, or turned around entirely rather than test the quarantine line.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an enormous moment of relief inside the White House, but it was far from a resolution.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The missiles already sitting in Cuba, fully unloaded weeks before the quarantine began.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're still there, and Soviet and Cuban work crews were reportedly continuing to assemble and prepare them around the clock, regardless of what was happening with the ships at sea.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: On October 25, the stand-off played out again in a very different setting, not on the open ocean, but inside the United Nations Security Council in New York City.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: American ambassador to the United Nations, Adly Stephenson, a former presidential candidate known for his careful, loyally speaking style, rose to directly confront his Soviet counterpart, Valerian Zorin, in a session broadcast live to television audiences around the world.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stephenson asks Zorin, plainly and repeatedly,
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether the Soviet Union had placed offensive missiles in Cuba, demanding a yes or no answer in front of the watching cameras.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Zorin, clearly caught, without instructions on how to respond, declined to answer directly, and instead complained about being treated like a defendant in a courtroom.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stevenson delivered one of the more quietly devastating lines of the entire Cold War,
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: stating that he was prepared to wait for his answer until hell freezes over, and that he was also prepared to present the evidence right there in the chamber.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then had aides unveiled a series of large photographic blowups, the same kind of grainy aerial photographs that had landed on Kennedy's desk more than a week earlier.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now displayed on easels for the entire world to see, showing unmistakable images of missile assembly equipment in the Cuban countryside.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a stunning piece of public theatre and a genuine diplomatic blow to the Soviet position, stripping away any remaining ability for Soviet officials to simply deny what was happening.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same day, with tensions at sea and at the United Nations both running at a fever pitch, American military readiness was raised once more, this time to death con 2.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The highest level of military alert the United States had ever reached before or since outside of Defcon 2, never having actually been used again in the decades that followed.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Defcon 2
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: meant strategic air command bombers loaded with live nuclear weapons, sitting on permanent airborne and ground alert, ready to launch within minutes of an order.
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It meant land-based and submarine-based nuclear missiles fully armed and ready for launch.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It meant, in the most literal and immediate sense, that the United States military was now postured for nuclear war, waiting only for a final order that everyone in that room in Washington hoped would never come.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then came October 27th, the day that would later become known, almost universally, among historians of the crisis, by a single grim nickname, Black Saturday.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is widely regarded as the single most dangerous day of the entire Cold War, the closest the world has ever come, as far as we know, to full-scale nuclear war.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it unfolded across several almost simultaneous crises happening in different places at once.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one capable on its own, of tipping the entire confrontation into catastrophe.
• 35:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early that morning, a message arrived in Washington from cruisechef
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a long somewhat rambling, emotionally raw letter, different in tone from the more formal diplomatic correspondence that had passed between the two leaders so far.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in it, cruisechev appeared to offer a path toward resolution.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American promise never to invade the island.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: X-COM spent the morning pouring over the letter with a mixture of relief and confusion, sensing that an exit from the crisis might finally be within reach.
• 36:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before that relief could settle in however, a second message arrived.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one far more formal and far more difficult.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Broadcast publicly over Moscow radio, rather than sent through quiet diplomatic channels.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This second message added an entirely new condition to the deal.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba only if the United States also removed its own Jupiter missiles from Turkey, the very missiles that had so unsettled cruise shift in the first place.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: XCOM now found itself facing two seemingly contradictory offers, arriving from the same government within hours of each other.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: With no clear explanation for why the terms had suddenly changed,
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: or which letter actually represented the Kremlin's real position.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will come back to those two letters in detail a little later in this story because they become central to how the crisis is finally resolved.
• 37:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: For now, just hold onto the fact that the morning of Black Saturday brought confusion layered directly on top of crisis.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in the early afternoon, came news that turned confusion into something closer to dread.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: A United States U2 reconnaissance plane
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: flown by an experienced Air Force pilot named Major Rudolf Anderson, had been shot down over eastern Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fired without explicit authorization from Moscow by Soviet commanders on the ground, who had grown increasingly anxious about American surveillance flights, and had been given some discretion over local air defense decisions.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Major Anderson was killed instantly, becoming the only direct combat fatality of the entire crisis.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction inside XCOM to this news was immediate and severe.
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several military advisers argued strongly that the shooting down of an unarmed American reconnaissance plane was an act of war that demanded an immediate retaliatory strike against the surface to air missile site.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: and quite possibly against the broader missile infrastructure across the island.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy, despite enormous pressure, once again resisted ordering an immediate strike, choosing instead to wait.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Together more information about what exactly had happened and why.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than respond reflexively to a single, terrible, but still somewhat ambiguous event.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would later become clear.
• 38:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the order to fire on Anderson's plane had not come from cruise chuff or the Kremlin directly, but from local Soviet commanders acting largely on their own judgement.
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: A detail that had it been known with certainty in the chaos of that afternoon.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: might have changed how Washington chose to respond, as if all of that were not enough for a single day.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two other crises were unfolding almost simultaneously.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Far from the conference rooms of Washington, in places where the men running X-Comb had almost no direct visibility or control at all.
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to spend our entire next chapter on those two events.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: because they deserve careful, dedicated attention of their own.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: For now, simply understand this.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the evening of October 27, 1962, the crisis had reached its absolute peak.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: An American pilot was dead.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two contradictory letters sat unanswered on the President's desk.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: military advisers were pressing harder than ever for retaliation and events outside anyone's direct control.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Events that people in that Washington conference room did not even know were happening, were pushing the world closer to catastrophe than any single decision made inside the White House that day.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will return to how Black Saturday resolved and how the crisis as a whole finally came to an end.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: After we take a slow, careful look at the things that were happening underneath the surface of this story.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and in the skies over Alaska, completely outside the control of either President Kennedy or Premia Kruschef.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3 The Secret Near Misses
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything we have talked about so far happened in places where, at least someone, somewhere, was making a deliberate, considered decision, Kennedy weighing his options in the cabinet room.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crouchchev drafting letters in the Kremlin, Ambassador Stevenson choosing his words carefully in front of the cameras at the United Nations.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even the shooting down of Major Anderson's plane, tragic as it was, came from an identifiable chain of command, a local Soviet commander, making a judgement call under pressure.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the two events we are about to walk through happened almost entirely outside of any of that.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They happened in places far from Washington and far from Moscow, made by small groups of exhausted, frightened men, working with incomplete information, who had no way of calling the president or the premiere to ask for guidance and only minutes, sometimes only seconds, to decide what to do.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians who have studied the Cuban missile crisis closely, often point to these two episodes as the moments when the world came closest to nuclear war.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: closer even than anything happening inside X-Com itself, simply because, almost nobody, outside of the people directly involved, even new these events were happening until decades later when files were declassified and witnesses began speaking publicly about what they remembered.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's start beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, with the story of a Soviet submarine known by its designation B59.
• 42:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: As part of Operation Anadir, the broader secret deployment to Cuba, the Soviet Union had sent a small flotilla of four diesel-powered attacks submarines across the Atlantic, intended to provide cover and support for the cargo ships making their way towards
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not the nuclear-powered submarines that would come to dominate later decades of the Cold War.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were older, diesel electric vessels, originally designed for operations in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, never intended for the warm, humid conditions of the Caribbean sea in late October.
• 42:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each of these submarines, including B59, was carrying something that American naval forces tracking them did not know about at the time.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: a single nuclear tip torpedo, roughly equivalent in destructive power to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, intended for use only under the most extreme circumstances.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the American Naval quarantine took effect, the United States Navy had been actively searching for these Soviet submarines for days.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: using sonar equipped destroyers and patrol aircraft, dropping sonar boys across a wide search area, hoping to locate and track them.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though not, as far as American commanders understood the situation, with any expectation of actually attacking them outright.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the evening of October 27th, the same brutal day we just spent so much time on, an American destroyer group finally located submarine B59, submerged in the water's near Cuba and began a tense game of sonar, cat and mouse, trying to force the submarine to surface for identification.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A board B59, conditions had become almost unbearable.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The submarine had been submerged,
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and running on battery power for an extended period, conserving its limited air supply, and temperatures inside the hull, had reportedly climbed past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some compartments.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: With carbon dioxide levels rising steadily, as the cruise air supply degraded, the submarine's air conditioning system designed for cold northern waters, struggled badly with the tropical heat outside the hull.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: crew members were reportedly collapsing from heat exhaustion, and because the submarine had been submerged and out of radio contact with Moscow for an extended stretch of time, its captain and officers had no way of knowing the latest developments in the crisis playing out on the surface.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: As far as they knew, war between the United States and the Soviet Union might already have begun without them.
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in these conditions.
• 44:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: exhausted, overheated, and completely cut off from any outside information that the American destroyers above began dropping a series of small practice depth charges around B59's position.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: These depth charges were intended by the American commanders as a signaling device.
• 45:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A standard, internationally understood method of telling a submerged submarine to surface for identification, not as an attack meant to damage or sink the vessel.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to the crew of B59, with no knowledge of this signaling convention and no way to confirm the explosions were merely meant as a warning.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The experience of explosions detonating nearby in the water.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: shaking the hull while they sat in stifling heat, cut off from any news of the wider world, felt unmistakably like the opening moments of an actual attack.
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The submarine's captain, a man named Valentin Savitsky, reportedly became convinced that war had already broken out between the Soviet Union and the United States, and that his submarine was now under direct attack.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accounts from surviving crew members, given decades later, once the story was finally declassified and made public.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Describes of Itzky, as exhausted, furious, and increasingly desperate.
• 46:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point reportedly shouting that the crew would not become the laughing stock of the fleet, and would prefer to die rather than be humiliated, before giving the order to arm and prepare the submarines nuclear torpedo for launch against the American ships above.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under Soviet naval protocol for this particular submarine flotilla, the launch of a nuclear weapon required the agreement of three senior officers aboard the vessel, not the captain's decision alone.
• 46:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Captain Savitsky was one of those three required votes.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he had clearly made up his mind.
• 46:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ship's political officer aboard, a man named Ivan Maslenikov, reportedly agreed with the captain that they were under attack and that retaliation was justified.
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That left a single remaining vote, belonging to the Flotilla's second in command, a man named Vasili Arkipov.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: who happened to be aboard B-59 that day, overseeing the broader submarine group rather than commanding the vessel directly.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Archipov refused to give his consent.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accounts differ slightly on exactly how the disagreement unfolded, inside that hot, cramped, terrified submarine.
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the broad shape of the story has been confirmed by surviving crew members and by Soviet naval records made public decades after the crisis ended.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Archipov argued that the depth charges, while frightening, did not necessarily mean war had broken out.
• 47:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: that there were other possible explanations, and that launching a nuclear weapon against American ships, an action that would almost certainly have triggered an immediate and massive American nuclear response against Soviet territory, was not a decision to be made on the basis of incomplete information and fraying nerves alone.
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He argued, essentially,
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: for patients, for surfacing the submarine and trying to re-establish contact and gather more information before doing anything irreversible.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth sitting with this for a moment.
• 48:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, the way we sit with most things on this show.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: A single disagreement inside a single overheated submarine between three exhausted men who had no way of knowing what was actually happening on the surface.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: came down to one man's refusal to agree and that refusal is very likely the reason a nuclear weapon was not launched in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis.
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Had Archipov voted alongside the other two officers, historians widely agree that the resulting nuclear torpedo strike against American naval vessels would almost certainly have triggered an immediate American nuclear response.
• 48:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very likely against Cuba and quite possibly against the Soviet Union directly.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: An escalation that neither President Kennedy nor Premier
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sicily Archipov, virtually unknown to the wider public for most of his life.
• 49:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: is now remembered by many historians of the nuclear age as quite possibly the single individual most responsible for preventing nuclear war during the 20th century.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he did it not through any grand diplomatic gesture, but simply by saying no, in a cramped, overheated submarine, far beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea, in a room that almost nobody on the surface
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, B59 surfaced under the watchful eyes of the American destroyers above was identified and was allowed to withdraw without further incident.
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's true cargo and the conversation that had just taken place inside its hull remaining completely unknown to the American Navy.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and to the wider world for more than 30 years afterward.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let's turn to the second event we want to walk through in this chapter.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that unfolded not deep underwater but high in the cold skies above Alaska on that very same impossibly tense Saturday.
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: As part of the routine American surveillance program that had been keeping watch on Soviet activity throughout the Cold War, a separate United States Air Force U2 reconnaissance plane, flown by a pilot named Charles Maltzby, had taken off that day on a mission completely unrelated to Cuba.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: an air sampling flight intended to collect atmospheric data near the North Pole, part of an ongoing program to monitor for evidence of Soviet nuclear testing.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a routine, almost mundane assignment.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of mission American YouTube pilots had flown many times before without incident.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: On this particular flight, however, a combination of technical difficulties, including problems with the plane's navigational instruments, and the disorienting effect of flying at extreme altitude near the magnetic north pole, where standard compass navigation becomes notably less reliable.
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: caused Maltsby to drift significantly off his intended course.
• 51:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than completing his loop, and returning safely to Alaska, he found himself flying without realising it at first, directly into Soviet airspace, over the Chukot Peninsula in the far eastern Soviet Union.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet air defence radar picked up the unidentified aircraft, almost immediately.
• 51:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Soviet fighter jets were scrambled to intercept it.
• 51:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the very same day that Soviet forces in Cuba had just shot down an American reconnaissance plane and killed its pilot.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the perspective of Soviet commanders monitoring their airspace that day,
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: An unidentified American aircraft, appearing deep inside Soviet territory, at the height of the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War, looked quite reasonably, like it could be the opening move of something far more serious, possibly even an attempt to gather last-minute reconnaissance ahead of a coordinated American attack.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In response, the United States Air Force scrambled its own fighter jets from bases in Alaska to attempt to locate and escort Maltzby's plane back toward American airspace before Soviet aircraft could reach him.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critically, the American fighters sent to retrieve him.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: were armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles, standard equipment for a laskan air-defense squadrons at the time, meaning that for a period of perhaps 90 minutes, nuclear armed, Soviet and American aircraft were both converging towards the same patch of sky.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each side uncertain exactly what the other intended to do, in the immediate aftermath of one pilot already having been shot down and killed that same day.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maltzby, running dangerously low on fuel after his unintentional detour and unable to clearly understand Soviet radio communications attempting to direct him, eventually managed
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: partly through his own piloting skill, and partly through sheer luck to turn back toward Alaska and glide his plane to a safe landing with what was later calculated to be only a few minutes of fuel remaining, having narrowly avoided both running out of fuel over hostile territory and any direct confrontation with the Soviet fighters that had been sent up to intercept him.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is genuinely difficult to overstate how dangerous this single, almost accidental episode was.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leia directly on top of everything else happening that same Saturday.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A wayward American spy plane present in Soviet skies for entirely innocent and unrelated reasons.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: very nearly created a second armed confrontation between nuclear capable forces on the exact same day that Major Anderson had already been shot down over Cuba.
• 54:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the exact moment when both Washington and Moscow were already operating under enormous strain, exhaustion and uncertainty.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither President Kennedy, nor Premier Kruschev, had ordered this flight, planned for it, or had any direct control over how it unfolded.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It happened almost entirely because of a navigational era near the North Pole.
• 54:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of miles from Cuba, in a part of the world, that had nothing directly to do with the missiles that started the crisis in the first place.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Taken together,
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The submarine, deep beneath the Caribbean and the spy plane lost over the Arctic.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Illustrate something important about the Cuban missile crisis.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is easy to lose sight of when the story is told only through the official meetings in Washington and Moscow.
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The greatest dangers of those 13 days did not come only from deliberate decisions made by the two superpowers leadership.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came just as much, perhaps even more, from the simple chaotic reality of placing enormous numbers of nuclear weapons under the control of exhausted, frightened human beings operating with incomplete information.
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of miles from anyone who could offer them calm, considered guidance in the middle of the single most dangerous moment of the entire nuclear age.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fact that neither event led to catastrophe owes a great deal to luck and a great deal more to a small handful of individuals.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: for silly archipov chief among them who chose patience and restraint in moments when almost everything around them was pushing toward the opposite choice.
• 55:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: With both of those harrowing hidden near misses now behind us, let's go back to where we left off in Washington on the evening of Black Saturday and follow the final, exhausting push toward a resolution.
• 56:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We left things in Washington on the evening of October 27, 1962, with X-Comb holding two contradictory letters from Crouchchev, a dead American pilot, immense pressure from military advisors to retaliate.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: an absolutely no idea that a Soviet submarine commander had nearly launched a nuclear torpedo just hours earlier, or that an American spy plane had nearly triggered a separate confrontation over the Arctic on that very same day, as far as the people in that Washington conference room knew.
• 56:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crisis they were already managing was bad enough without any of that.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now we need to slow down and look closely at how, against all of that pressure, a resolution was actually found in the space of just a few more hours.
• 57:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with those two letters, because understanding them is essential to understanding everything that follows.
• 57:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first letter, the long, somewhat rambling, emotionally raw one that arrived on the morning of October 27th, had actually been sent the night before, late on October 26th.
• 57:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It read less like a formal diplomatic communication, and more like a personal, almost confessional message from one exhausted, frightened leader to another.
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: the danger both nations now found themselves in.
• 57:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Comparing the situation to a rope with a knot of war being pulled tighter and tighter from both ends, and warning that the harder both sides pulled, the harder it would eventually be to untie that knot at all.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until eventually, the rope would simply break.
• 58:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He proposed, in essence, a simple trade.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union would remove its weapons from Cuba under appropriate international verification in exchange for an American guarantee never to invade the island.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many members of XCOM after reading this letter carefully came away with a strong impression.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: that it had been written personally by Krushchev himself, possibly even without running it through the usual layers of Soviet bureaucratic editing and approval, and that it represented a genuine somewhat desperate offer to find a way out of the crisis, before it spiraled any further out of control.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert Kennedy himself would later describe the letter as having
• 58:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: the two countries were standing at the edge of, together.
• 58:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, just hours later, the second letter arrived.
• 58:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one broadcast publicly over Moscow radio, rather than delivered through private diplomatic channels, formal and precise, in a way the first letter had not been.
• 59:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reading as though it had been carefully drafted and reviewed by Soviet officials in a way the earlier message had not.
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This second letter added the additional condition regarding the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, proposing that the United States removed those missiles in exchange for the Soviet Union removing its missiles from Cuba, framing the entire situation
• 59:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: as a straight forward symmetrical trade between two roughly equivalent threats sitting near each other's borders.
• 59:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is one more piece of backstage maneuvering worth mentioning here.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because it helps explain why the first letter felt to several people who read it, like a genuine, personal opening, rather than a tactical move.
• 59:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the afternoon of October 26th, several hours before that first letter arrived in Washington, an American television journalist named John Scali, a correspondent for the ABC Television Network, who had cultivated a number of informal contacts within the Soviet embassy over the years, received an unusual lunch invitation from a Soviet official named Alexander Fecklissoff.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: who held the title of Press Natasha, but was, in reality, a senior intelligence officer with the Soviet Committee for state security.
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over that lunch, Fecklysov asked Scali, somewhat informally, and without any apparent official authorization to do so, whether the United States might be willing to accept a resolution along the lines of a Soviet missile withdrawal in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Scali,
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: that he had potentially just been handed an informal diplomatic channel of real significance.
• 1:00:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Relayed the conversation directly to the state department within the hour.
• 1:00:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: American officials, understanding that this kind of informal, deniable contact was a common cold war method for both sides to test the waters on a possible deal before committing to anything through official channels, took the overture seriously.
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Scali was asked to meet with Fettlis off again the following day, to convey that the United States would indeed look favorably on terms along those lines.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It remains a matter of some historical debate.
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: exactly how much this informal contact between a television reporter and a Soviet intelligence officer actually shaped cruise-chev's decision to send that first, softer letter later that same evening.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the timing lines up closely enough that many historians treat the scally-feckless off-conversation as a meaningful, if unofficial, part of the channel that ultimately produced the resolution to the crisis.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: alongside the more formal correspondence between the two governments.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The contradiction between these two letters created a genuine dilemma inside XCOM.
• 1:01:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some advisors suspected that hardliners within the Soviet government, perhaps including military leadership, had intervened between the two messages, pushing cruise-chief toward a tougher public position after he had privately signalled a softer one.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others worried that responding to one letter while ignoring the other, risked being seen as either too eager to concede, or too dismissive of a reasonable Soviet position, and that getting this single piece of correspondence wrong could derail any chance of resolving the crisis peacefully.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was Robert Kennedy who proposed the solution that would come to be remembered, somewhat informally among historians,
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The trollet ploy, a reference to the kind of misunderstanding-resolving move common in the novels of the 19th century English author Anthony trollev, in which a character chooses to respond to the more favorable, more generous interpretation of an ambiguous situation.
• 1:02:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than the Harsher one, essentially choosing to believe the best version of events, even when a worse version remains possible.
• 1:03:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The proposal was simple, audacious, and a little bit slimy.
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States would respond only to the first letter.
• 1:03:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: the private, softer one, proposing a straightforward trade of missile removal for a non-invasion pledge, and would simply ignore the second, more difficult public letter regarding Turkey entirely, as though it had never been received.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This decision, on its own, likely would not have been enough to fully resolve the standoff.
• 1:03:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it left the question of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey completely unaddressed in any public way.
• 1:03:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Kruschef had made it fairly clear that those missiles mattered enormously to him.
• 1:03:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So alongside the public response to the first letter, Robert Kennedy was given a separate far more delicate and far more secret assignment.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That night, October 27th.
• 1:03:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: 1962, Robert Kennedy traveled to the Department of Justice for a private meeting with Soviet Ambassador, Anatoli Dobrinin, arranged quietly and outside of any normal diplomatic channel, away from the press and away from most of Xcom itself.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The meeting took place late in the evening.
• 1:04:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Kennedy's office, with the building largely empty around them.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to Dobran's own later account of the conversation, Robert Kennedy appeared visibly exhausted and under enormous strain.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point telling the Soviet Ambassador plainly that time was running out, that military pressure within the American government for some kind of decisive action was growing by the hour, and that if a resolution could not be found within the next day or so, events might begin moving forward on their own.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: regardless of what either leader in Washington or Moscow actually wanted.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: During that conversation, Robert Kennedy delivered the heart of what would become the secret half of the eventual deal.
• 1:04:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States, he explained, could not publicly agree to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of an open, formal trade because doing so in full view of the world.
• 1:05:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: would look like the United States was abandoning a fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization member under pressure from the Soviet Union.
• 1:05:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: A precedent American officials worried could badly damage the trust of other allies who might begin to wonder whether their own American-provided defenses could similarly be traded away under enough pressure.
• 1:05:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, Kennedy indicated privately and informally.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the missiles in Turkey were already considered somewhat obsolete by American military planners.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And were, in fact, likely to be removed within a relatively short period of time, regardless of the Cuban crisis.
• 1:05:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: simply as part of ordinary military modernisation.
• 1:05:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the Soviet Union was willing to accept a quiet, unwritten, unofficial understanding along these lines, rather than insisting on a public, formal trade, a resolution to the entire crisis might be possible almost immediately.
• 1:06:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to notice just how strange and how human this moment actually was.
• 1:06:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fate of a confrontation that had brought the entire planet to the edge of nuclear war was, in its final hours, settled not through some grand treaty, signed by world leaders in a formal ceremony, but through a tired, late night conversation between two men in an otherwise empty government office.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither of whom had any formal legal authority to bind their respective countries to anything at all.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working out an arrangement that the rest of the world would not learn the full truth about for decades.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dobrinin relayed the substance of this conversation back to Moscow that same night, and Kruschev
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: After consulting with his own advisors through the early hours of October 28th, made his decision.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, in another public radio broadcast, Kruschev announced that the Soviet Union had agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba, under appropriate verification by the United Nations.
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In exchange for the American pledge, not to invade the island, accepting the terms of Kennedy's response to the first letter, and making no public mention at all of Turkey or the Jupiter
• 1:07:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the people inside XCOM, who did not know about Robert Kennedy's private conversation with Dobrenin the night before, the announcement came as something close to a miracle, a sudden, almost unexpected resolution to a crisis that had seemed only hours earlier to be spiraling rapidly out of anyone's control.
• 1:07:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the small handful of people who did know about the secret
• 1:07:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The relief was tempered with the understanding that an unwritten, deniable promise now sat quietly underneath the public deal.
• 1:08:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that the United States would need to honor without ever officially acknowledging that it had been made at all.
• 1:08:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: True to that private understanding, the United States did, in fact, quietly remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey within several months of the crisis ending, framed publicly and consistently as a routine military modernisation decision entirely unrelated to Cuba.
• 1:08:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly as Robert Kennedy had suggested it would be.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two halves of the deal, one public and one secret, fit together perfectly, and remained mostly hidden from public view for more than two decades, with many of the specific details of that late night meeting between Kennedy and Dobrenin, not becoming widely known until long after both men and eventually both Kennedy brothers had died.
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is the deal that ended the Cuban missile crisis.
• 1:08:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the surface, a relatively simple trade between Soviet missiles in Cuba and an American promise not to invade.
• 1:09:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Underneath that surface, a second, quieter trade involving the missiles in Turkey.
• 1:09:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: deliberately hidden from public view to protect the diplomatic standing of both leaders.
• 1:09:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And underneath even that, a tired late night conversation between two men in an empty office building, carrying in that single moment.
• 1:09:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: More weight than perhaps any other conversation of the entire 20th
• 1:09:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was, however, one significant person almost entirely left out of this entire resolution.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone whose country had been at the very center of the crisis from the beginning, and whose reaction to being left out tells us a great deal about what came next.
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That brings us to our final chapter.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 The Fallout and Legacy
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the relief in Washington and the relief in Moscow were both genuine and immediate, once Krushchev's announcement went out on the morning of October 28th, there was a third capital where the news landed very differently indeed.
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Havana, Fidel Castro learned of the agreement to remove the missiles from Cuba not through any direct communication from his Soviet allies, but through the same public radio broadcast that the rest of the world heard it on.
• 1:10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The country whose security had supposedly been the entire point of placing those missiles there in the first place had been informed of their removal after the fact.
• 1:10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: with no consultation, no negotiation, and no say in the terms whatsoever.
• 1:10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: By most historical accounts, Castro's reaction was something closer to fury than disappointment.
• 1:10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He reportedly felt humiliated, betrayed, and treated as little more than a minor piece on a chessboard, being moved around by too much larger powers, who had, in the end, made their deal entirely between themselves.
• 1:11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Discussing his country's fate without ever directly including him in the conversation that decided it.
• 1:11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Castro had agreed to host the missiles in the first place, partly out of genuine ideological alignment with the Soviet Union.
• 1:11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And partly out of a calculated belief that they would provide real protection against the American invasion, he's still feared deeply.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now those missiles were being withdrawn.
• 1:11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The invasion threat presumably still existed in his mind exactly as before, and Cuba had received nothing in writing, nothing official.
• 1:11:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond an informal American assurance not to invade that had been negotiated by Washington
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Castro reportedly refused for some time afterward to allow United Nations inspectors onto Cuban soil to verify the missile removal.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A condition that had been part of the public agreement between Kennedy and Kruschev, forcing the United States to rely instead on aerial reconnaissance and Soviet assurances, to confirm that the weapons had genuinely been withdrawn.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet officials, including a senior deputy, sent personally by Kruschev to smooth things over, found Castro icy and resentful for weeks afterward.
• 1:12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: a noticeable strain in what had previously been.
• 1:12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: At least publicly, a warm and enthusiastic alliance between the two communist governments.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The relationship between Havana and Moscow
• 1:12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: would recover over time, and Cuba would remain a close Soviet ally for decades to come.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the bitterness, Castro felt at being excluded from the negotiations that decided his country's fate never entirely disappeared, and he would refer back to this sense of betrayal in speeches and interviews for years afterward.
• 1:12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond Havana, the most immediate and concrete piece of institutional fallout from the crisis.
• 1:12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: involved a problem that had become starkly frighteningly obvious to officials on both sides over the preceding two weeks.
• 1:13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no fast, reliable, direct way for the leadership of the United States and the leadership of the Soviet Union to communicate with each other during a crisis.
• 1:13:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the entire 13 days, messages between Washington and Moscow had been passed through painfully slow, unreliable channels, encoded diplomatic cables that sometimes took many hours to be transmitted, translated, decoded and delivered.
• 1:13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio broadcasts intended for general audiences that had to be monitored and interpreted after the fact rather than received as direct,
• 1:13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: and occasional in-person meetings between ambassadors and officials that depended on whoever happened to be available at any given moment.
• 1:13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: During a crisis unfolding over hours and sometimes only minutes, this kind of delay was not just inconvenient, it was genuinely dangerous.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The contradictory letters from Krushchev on Black Saturday arriving hours apart with no clear explanation for the discrepancy are a direct example of exactly this kind of problem, where slow and imperfect communication
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: created confusion at the worst possible moment.
• 1:14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both governments recognized immediately in the aftermath of the crisis that this had to change.
• 1:14:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the months that followed, American and Soviet officials negotiated and established what came to be known informally as the Washington Mosco Hotline.
• 1:14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: A direct teleprinter link connecting the Pentagon in Washington with the Kremlin in Moscow, allowing the leadership of both nations to send urgent, written messages to each other within minutes rather than hours, bypassing the slower diplomatic channels that had nearly contributed to catastrophe during the crisis.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link became operational in the summer of 1963, less than a year after the missile crisis ended.
• 1:15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Running through cable connections that passed through several European countries along the way.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, contrary to a popular misconception that persists to this day,
• 1:15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: never actually a red telephone, allowing the two leaders to speak to each other directly by voice.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a written, typed communication system, chosen deliberately because written messages could be translated more precisely and left a clearer, less ambiguous record than a rushed conversation, conducted live and under pressure.
• 1:15:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: exactly the kind of miscommunication risk that had made the final days of the missile crisis so dangerous in the first place.
• 1:15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This hotline upgraded many times over the following decades as technology changed, remains in use between Washington and Moscow to this day, a direct institutional legacy of those 13 days in October.
• 1:16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond this single piece of new infrastructure,
• 1:16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Cuban missile crisis produced a broader, slower shift in how both superpowers approach their relationship with each other.
• 1:16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: A shift that historians often describe using a French word that would come to define much of the following decade.
• 1:16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: dead aren't, meaning roughly a relaxation or easing of tensions between two rival powers.
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having stared directly into the possibility of nuclear annihilation and stepped back from the edge, leaders in both Washington and Moscow emerged from the crisis with a noticeably sharper, more visceral appreciation for just how easily a localized confrontation
• 1:16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: could spiral into something neither side actually wanted or could control.
• 1:16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: This shift showed up fairly quickly in concrete diplomatic action, less than a year after the crisis.
• 1:17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, signed the limited test band treaty, formally known as the treaty banning nuclear weapon tests,
• 1:17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater, prohibiting all nuclear weapons testing in those three environments, while still permitting underground testing to continue.
• 1:17:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was far from a complete solution to the dangers of the nuclear arms race.
• 1:17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: and both superpowers would continue building and testing weapons underground for decades to come.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it represented the first formal, binding agreement between the two Cold War rivals, specifically aimed at limiting some aspect of the nuclear competition between them.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it would not have been politically possible, in all likelihood, without the shared, sobering experience both governments had just been through together in October of the previous year.
• 1:18:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The broader spirit of data would ebb and flow considerably over the following two decades.
• 1:18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: periods of renewed tension, alternating with periods of genuine cooperation between Washington and Moscow, but many historians point specifically to the Cuban missile crisis.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the moment when both superpowers first began to seriously grapple at the highest levels of government, with the idea that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the rules of great power competition.
• 1:18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A conventional war between two ordinary rival nations,
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: might end with one side winning and one side losing.
• 1:18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A nuclear war between two superpowers, both sides increasingly understood after October of 1962, would very likely end with both sides losing everything along with a significant portion of the rest of the planet.
• 1:18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This realization did not eliminate the cold war rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• 1:18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: which would continue in various forms for nearly another 30 years, but it did introduce a new persistent caution into how that rivalry was conducted.
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: A recognition that certain confrontations were simply too dangerous to allow to escalate the way the Cuban missile crisis nearly had.
• 1:19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: For President Kennedy himself, the crisis became by most accounts, both the most stressful and ultimately the most successful foreign policy episode of his presidency, a moment widely seen at the time and ever since, as proof that careful, patient, deliberate decision-making.
• 1:19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: resisting pressure from military advisers, pushing for immediate and overwhelming force, could successfully navigate, even the most dangerous international confrontation without sliding into outright war.
• 1:19:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would not have much more time to build on that reputation, just over a year after the crisis ended, in November of 1963.
• 1:20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, leaving historians to speculate endlessly and without any definitive answer about how his approach to the Soviet Union and to the broader Cold War might have continued to evolve, had he lived longer.
• 1:20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Kruschev,
• 1:20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: the crisis left a more complicated legacy.
• 1:20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within his own government, some of his colleagues viewed the entire episode as a serious embarrassment, a secret operation that had been discovered before it could be completed, followed by what many Soviet hardliners saw as a humiliating public retreat in the face of American pressure.
• 1:20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: regardless of the secret, unwritten concession involving Turkey, that most of those same colleagues knew nothing about.
• 1:20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Less than two years later, in October of 1964, Cruschev was removed from power in an internal communist party maneuver with the Cuban missile crisis cited among several factors, alongside a range of domestic policy failures.
• 1:21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: contributing to his colleagues' loss of confidence in his leadership.
• 1:21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for the world more broadly, the Cuban missile crisis settled permanently into historical memory as the closest, most concrete example of just how near the entire planet had come.
• 1:21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and could conceivably come again to a nuclear catastrophe capable of killing hundreds of millions of people within a matter of hours.
• 1:21:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story that continues to be studied closely, generation after generation, not simply as a historical curiosity, but as a kind of permanent cautionary lesson in crisis management.
• 1:21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the immense value of patients and clear communication under extreme pressure, and in the quiet, terrifying truth,
• 1:21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the survival of the entire planet on at least one occasion in October of 1962 may have come down to a small number of individual human choices.
• 1:22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: made under enormous strain by people whose names most of us had never heard before.
• 1:22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many of whom we still know surprisingly little about even now.
• 1:22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: People like Vasily Archaeopov, sitting in an overheated submarine far beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea, refusing to add his vote to a decision that would very likely have ended in catastrophe.
• 1:22:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: People like Charles Maltzby, gliding his fuel-starved spy plane back across the Bearing Strait with only minutes of fuel left in his tanks.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: People like Robert Kennedy, sitting across a desk late at night from a tired Soviet ambassador, quietly working out the unwritten half of a deal that the rest of the world would not learn about for decades.
• 1:22:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: History, it turns out, is very often decided this way.
• 1:22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: not solely in grand speeches and formal treaties, but in small, exhausted, human moments.
• 1:22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Made by people doing the very best they could, with the limited information available to them, often not realizing at the time, just how much was actually riding on their decision.
• 1:23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is where we will leave the story of the Cuban missile crisis tonight.
• 1:23:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a heavy story in many ways, and it is completely understandable if parts of it sat a little un-easily with you while you were listening.
• 1:23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But notice also how the story actually ends.
• 1:23:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ends with patience, winning out over panic.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, and again, in moment after moment, even when patients was the harder, less satisfying choice available.
• 1:23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ends with restraint, chosen deliberately by a president, resisting his own generals, and chosen almost by accident in the most literal sense.
• 1:23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: By a single naval officer in an overheated submarine, who simply was not willing to bet the entire world on an assumption he could not be certain of.
• 1:23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ends with two rival governments, having stared as closely as any two nations ever have.
• 1:24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the edge of complete catastrophe, choosing afterward to build a faster way to talk to each other.
• 1:24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than simply hoping the next crisis would somehow resolve itself the way this one barely did, there is something genuinely comforting in that, if you let yourself sit with it for a moment.
• 1:24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The closest the world ever came to a third world war, did not end in disaster.
• 1:24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ended slowly and imperfectly and almost by accident in places in a series of small human choices toward caution, toward patience, toward picking up a phone or in this case a teleprinter.
• 1:24:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of reaching for something far more permanent and far more destructive, the world kept going.
• 1:24:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It always has so far, and the people who lived through those 13 days went on afterward to live the rest of their lives, mostly never knowing just how close some of those individual hidden moments had actually come to changing everything.
• 1:25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can let all of that settle now.
• 1:25:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing else you need to do with this information tonight.
• 1:25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You do not need to remember the names of every letter, or the exact date of every meeting, or the precise sequence of every single day.
• 1:25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of that will still be here, recorded the same way whenever you want to come back to it.
• 1:25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: For now, it is enough to simply have let the story wash over you.
• 1:25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, the way water moves over stones in a riverbed, smoothing them down very gradually over a very long period of time without ever needing to rush.
• 1:25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 1:25:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this kept you company tonight.
• 1:25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: or helped you drift off somewhere along the way.
• 1:25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is exactly what it was made for, and there is nothing more you need to do about it right now, except rest.
• 1:25:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no test in the morning.
• 1:25:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no need to remember any of this clearly by the time you wake up.
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The missiles came and the missiles went.
• 1:26:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president and the premier and the submarine commander and the lost pilot circling somewhere over the Arctic.
• 1:26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: All made their choices.
• 1:26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: A very long time ago now.
• 1:26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: the story settled, the way these stories always eventually do, into something we can simply listen to quietly from a safe distance on a calm night, with nothing at all required of us, except to rest.
• 1:26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well.
• 1:26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will be here again next time with another quiet corner of history to drift through together.