Table of Contents
Prologue xiii
1 A Reflection on Luck in History 3
2 World War III Was About to Begin 5
3 "We Will Die, but We Will Sink Them All" 11
4 Capt. Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov 22
5 The Long Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962 29
Book I The Making of the Nuclear Age, 1945-1962
Part 1 Truman and Stalin
6 "This Is the Greatest Thing in History" 44
7 "The Secret of the Atomic Bomb Might Be Hard to Keep" 55
8 "Our Momentary Superiority" 64
Part 2 Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Castro, and the "Weapon of Mass Destruction"
9 "We Face a Battle to Extinction" 76
10 "An Extraordinary Departure" 86
11 "There Is Not Communists … but Cubanists" 93
12 "General Disarmament Is the Most Important" 107
13 "We Cannot Let the Present Government There Go On" 122
Part 3 Kennedy Khrushchev, Castro, and the Bay of Pigs
14 "Eisenhower Is Going to Escape" 132
15 "AES Wholly Disapproves of the Project" 146
16 "Cuba Might Become a Sino-Soviet Bloc Missile Base" 160
17 "It Will Be a Cold Winter" 167
Book II The Thirteen Days, October 16-28, 1962
Part 4 Khrushchev's Missiles
18 "What If We Put Our Nuclear Missiles in Cuba?" 182
19 "Without Our Help Cuba Will Be Destroyed" 193
Part 5 October 16 (Tuesday), Day One
20 "They're There" 204
21 "Actions Were Begun on October 3 to Prepare for Military Action Against Cuba" 215
22 "Bomb the Missiles; Invade Cuba" 222
23 "I'll Tell My Big Brother on You" 236
24 "Negotiation and Sanity, Always" 241
25 "Last Month I Should Have Said That We Don't Care" 247
Part 6 October 17 (Wednesday)-October 12 (Monday)
26 "Possible Courses of Action and Unanswered Questions" 258
27 "What Action Lessens the Chance of a Nuclear Exchange?" 266
28 "Flipping a Coin as to Whether You End Up with World War or Not" 277
29 The Chief Confronts the Chiefs 287
30 "Pull the Group Together!" 296
31 "I Trust that You Will Support Me" 301
32 "Nuclear War That Week Certainly Was Not Excluded from His Mind" 309
33 "What's EDP?" 316
Part 7 October 22 (Monday)-October 26 (Friday)
34 "We May Have the War in the Next Twenty-Four Hours" 326
35 "Kennedy Sleeps with a Wooden Knife" 337
36 "A Game Which We Don't Know the Ending Of" 344
37 "The Mobs Turned Up in London Instead of Havana" 353
38 "You Would Have Been Impeached" 359
39 "We Are Trying to Convey a Political Message … Not Start a War" 361
40 "A Russian Submarine-Almost Anything but That" 372
41 "Events Have Gone Too Far" 383
42 "Trade Them Out or Take Them Out" 393
43 "Time Is Very Urgent" 403
Part 8 October 27 (Saturday)-October 28 (Sunday)
44 "Let Us Take Measures to Untie That Knot" 410
45 "Liquidate the Bases in Turkey and We Win" 416
46 "To Any Rational Man It Will Look Like a Very Fair Trade" 419
47 "Attacking Sunday or Monday" 423
48 "We're Going to Have to Take Our Weapons Out of Turkey" 426
49 "An Act of Legitimate Defense" 437
50 "There Is Very Little Time to Resolve This Issue" 440
51 "You Got Us into This, Now You Get Us Out" 449
52 "I Thought It Was My Last Meal" 453
53 "We Have Ordered Our Officers to Stop Building Bases" 456
Part 9 Lies and Legacies
54 "Most of Them Did Not Like Adlai" 460
55 "It Ain't Necessarily So…" 465
Notes 471
Bibliography 553
Acknowledgments 571
Index 577