"We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." --Dean Rusk, Oct. 24, 1962
The world has never been closer to nuclear war than it was 35 years ago, during the heart-stopping days of the Cuban missile crisis. The confrontation started when the Soviet Union began covertly shipping into Fidel Castro's Cuba 72 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, capable of wiping out U.S. cities from Florida to the Pacific Northwest. American U-2 spy planes spotted them, and on Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy began 13 days of crisis meetings with senior advisers in what he called the...
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