| This dissertation is a narrative of the Cuban missile crisis, the thirteen days that made up the world's most dangerous nuclear crisis. I have synthesized the onslaught of information on the crisis that has been released or recounted in the last seven years. The work relies on the latest documents and oral histories about the crisis from the United States, Russia and Cuba.;This is a day-by-day account of the crisis that recounts events and discussions as they happened. As much as possible, I have presented the Soviet and Cuban perspectives, along with those of Great Britain, Canada, France, West Germany and Brazil. The primary focus though is the United States, with emphases including the often only touched upon and caricatured intelligence and military responses to the crisis.;At the center of the story though is President John Kennedy and his advisers. At times the dissertation is almost a minute-by-minute account of their discussions thanks to the use of transcripts of tapes that the president secretly made of the meetings. For the first time, literally in human history, we know exactly what decision makers said in their most trying moments; we need not rely for our sources on memory or stenography with their attendant problems of bias, misinterpretation or forgetfulness. In addition, through the accretion of otherwise insignificant pieces of information--what people ate and where and when they ate it, the grim jokes they told, the sometimes comical ways they tried to keep their meetings secret, the manner in which they responded to evacuation procedures in the event of nuclear war--I have tried to give the reader the feel of what it must have been like to be at the center of a nuclear crisis. |
