I highly recommend it for students of the Cold War, for anyone who sweated through the crisis or for anyone who wants to learn a lesson from histÄuring the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis I was living in Boston. With several useful appendices, 40 pages of chapter footnotes and an extensive bibliography, DEFCON-2 can serve as a stand-alone single-volume reference or as an excellent starting point for further research. One of the facts that the authors reveal is that we were MUCH closer to nuclear war than previously thought. Gresham took full advantage of such sources to construct the most comprehensive history yet of the Kennedy-Khrushchev game of "brinksmanship" that could have ended civilization as we know it. DEFCON-2 authors Norman Polmar and John D. ![]() The U.S., albeit at a slow pace and with considerable resistance in some cases, also continues to declassify formerly secret documents. These documents reveal the Soviet side of past global events that, for Western researchers, had previously been shrouded in mystery and subject to conjecture. Kennedy's finest hour, a time in which he and his closest political and military advisors "really earned their paychecks." There have been many other books about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but none have been as thoroughly researched, detailed and readable as "DEFCON-2." One of the advantages that historians and authors have today is that they can draw on literally thousands of documents that the former USSR has released from the KGB's most secret vaults. The eventual peaceful resolution of the crisis was inarguably U.S. and USSR came closer to waging nuclear war on each other than at any other time during the Cold War. Before it ended two weeks later, the U.S. They raised the alarm, and within hours the crisis was on. Intelligence analysts who later examined the photographs from the mission detected the construction of the missile bases. On October 14, an American U-2 spy plane flew a routine high-altitude reconnaissance mission over the Communist island. The clandestine operation was called "Anadyr." It did not remain secret for long. Khrushchev decided to establish SS-4 medium-range and SS-5 intermediate-range nuclear-armed ballistic missile bases in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Frustrated and threatened by American missiles based in Europe, and seeking both a military and political foothold in the Western Hemisphere, Soviet Premier Nikita S. DEFCON-2 tells the story of the "Cuban Missile Crisis." It began in the fall of 1962. In the U.S., the armed forces' hair-trigger alert level was called "Defense Condition 2," or "DEFCON-2." The world held its breath as all eyes turned to the small island nation of Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. The two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, brought their nuclear arsenals of missile-armed submarines, long-range strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles to an unprecedented condition of war readiness. ![]() ![]() For thirteen days in October 1962, the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.
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