// The /fun Collection · Cold War Air Defense //
Thirteen
Days_
October 1962. A U-2 comes home with 928 photographs and the world gets fifteen days it never knew it almost lost. Drag the clock. Watch the missile sites appear on the boards, the quarantine line go up, the ships stop dead in the water, and the one Saturday when everything nearly went wrong at once.
Opening the record… ▊
How close was it?
Closer than anyone in the room knew. EXCOMM debated whether the missiles were operational; some already were. Nobody in Washington knew the Soviets had roughly a hundred tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba with local release authority, or that submarine B-59, deaf to Moscow and being pinged with signaling charges, carried a nuclear torpedo its captain wanted to use. One staff officer, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. Much of this surfaced only at anniversary conferences decades later, when the men who had aimed the weapons compared notes.
Every entry on this board is drawn from the declassified record: the EXCOMM tapes, the State Department's FRUS volumes, and the National Security Archive's document collections. The times are Washington's. The dread was everybody's.
Sources
A /fun project. The bombers this crisis feared are on the scope in SAGE: The Blue Room, and the shelters are in The Family Fallout Shelter.