Dan Snow's History Hit - The Cuban Missile Crisis Explained

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

The nuclear close calls, rogue commanders, silent standoffs and split-second decisions that nearly resulted in nuclear armageddon… In this episode, Dan breaks down the edge-of-your-seat crisis that almost triggered Doomsday, and explains how individual heroism and blind luck saved humanity from extinction.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Natasha Hughes.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. seconds away from total nuclear annihilation. Our world may have got to that point on a Saturday night on the 27th of October 1962. It was around 8.50pm aboard a hot, dimly lit submarine, three tired, scared, stressed men had an argument about firing a nuclear weapon. It all happened in the Western Atlantic on the approaches to the island of Cuba. Now, there's a myth about the Cuban missile crisis.

A wise young president, JFK, handsome chap, armed with a history book on the outbreak of World War 1, staring down the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev in a masterclass of calculated diplomacy. But in recent years, groundbreaking new research, has revealed that that traditional narrative is a fabrication. The truth is far, far more terrifying. This was not a finely choreographed ballet of grand strategy. It was a blind scramble in a dark room. Both leaders, American and Soviet,

pretty much lost control of what was happening on the ground, on the sea, or under it. From rogue Soviet commanders, shooting down American aircraft against orders to a crew trapped inside a depth-charged submarine debating the launch of a nuclear torpedo. Humanity survived by a good dose of luck and by some common sense where it was needed most. So brace itself, folks, because today I'm going to talk you through the terrifying reality of the Cuban missile crisis. It's 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union are locked in an intense ideological, strategic military competition.

A standoff. They're two superpowers, the likes of which the world's never seen before, armed with weapons of unimaginable power. They've got diametrically opposed worldviews. And for the rest of us, nearly all the rest of the world, are being centrifugally sucked into this. power struggle until that rivalry is truly globalised. Their respective allies, their clients are clashing from Southeast Asia to Berlin, to Africa, to South and Central America. Flashpoints are multiplying across the world. Berlin, for example, was a city divided down the middle by these two armed camps. In 1961, you get a concrete and barbed wire barrier, a wall smash through the

middle of the city, a very real wall, but also a metaphorical divide between those two worlds, East and West, Communist and Capital. West Berlin. Now, a little pinprick of Western life surrounded by a sea of communism was terribly vulnerable. The threat of a Soviet blockade or a military move against West Berlin, haunted policymakers in Washington and elsewhere. Because that was the lowest hanging fruit. That's where everyone assumed the great next clash would start, where East and West were eyeballing each other over the most fragile of front lines. That's where people expected the Cold War would go hot. But they were wrong. There were plenty of other places where that fuse could be lit as well. In the Middle East, American-backed Israel

fought wars against its Soviet-backed neighbours, and those promised to spiral out of control and suck in the great powers, just as that terrible occasion in 1914, when the Archduke's assassination Sarajevo had spread monstrous violence far beyond the confines of Austria, Hungary and Serbia. There had been Korea,

where Soviet jets had sparred with American fighters above that mountainous peninsula. And then there was Cuba. a place where the charismatic revolutionary Fidel Castro had landed on that Caribbean island in 1959 were just a handful of men. And bizarrely, the whole rotten superstructure of the state had collapsed. Castro had seized power. He'd confiscated American-owned factories and businesses. He'd made powerful enemies. And he needed a powerful friend. Moscow offered money, trade, legitimacy, arm support. So now Cuba, which for the Americans, is in their backyard, a place where the Americans have

invaded and intervened several times over the last half century, and I'd come to think of it as well within their sphere of influence. Well, suddenly Cuba is rolling out the red carpet for the American's sworn enemy. It's now a Soviet foothold in America's backyard. Just after Castro sees his power in 1961, the US sponsored invasion of Cuba, the so-called Bay of Pigs Fiasco. It achieved absolutely nothing, except it totally poisoned the very idea, the image of the USA in the mind of Castro and his ruling elite. The Cuban regime were now understandably, I suppose, paranoid about direct American military invasion, about regime change, about losing their own lives, them being shackled, shot against a wall, taken to America

for trial. had a big shopping list from his new Soviet friends. He wanted a shield. He wanted protection. He wanted guarantees. The Soviets themselves, well, they wanted to catch a break. They were dangerously behind the USA in the madness that was the ballistics weapons race of the 1960s. The Soviets had hundreds of nuclear weapons, but their main delivery system was a bomber, an aircraft, specifically the Tupilev-TU-95, the Russian bear. Now, this monstrous aircraft, would fly on what was probably going to be a one-way trip to rain down nuclear weapons on the United States of America. But conceivably, those bears could be intercepted. They could be shot down.

The Americans might be able to protect the homeland. And so the Soviets had also developed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile. Their version, in fact, had come on stream in 1960. They were the vast rockets at the Pleisette Cosmodrome, a spaceport near Archangel, in the very north of Russia. Now, unlike planes flying over the Arctic to strike at the US, these were unstoppable. These ballistic missiles traveled at 8,000 meters per second.

They could strike anywhere in the USA, but they were new. They were glitchy. Now, fascinating, one of the reasons that the Soviets and the Americans launched so many missions into space in these years, sending unfortunate dogs and guinea pigs and whatever else into orbit, was actually because they wanted to show the other side that their nuclear-capable ballistic missiles worked. The Soviets, though, only had a few dozen of these missiles, and they were unreliable.

They did have, much more reliable, and they had hundreds of them, medium-range ballistic missiles. These were pretty useful. They could turn Alaska, they could turn Britain, they could turn Canada into glass. but they couldn't get far enough to hit the lower 48 states from their bases in northern Russia. In the terrifying event of war, these missiles would carry a hydrogen warhead, a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon with a one megaton warhead. A megaton is the explosive energy released by one million tons of conventional high explosives of TNT. One million. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 0.0.0.0.000.

015 of a megaton. So we are talking many, many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. When I was researching this story, I was just so struck and just how far history was coming at you in this period. 1957, the Soviets put Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit. April 1961, just a couple years later, really, four years later, Gagarin becomes the first man in space. Now, he is sat atop a variant of the R-Satoll. Seven, Sem Yorca, which is this enormous rocket that powers these intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's all happening at this time. It's all moving fast. As Gagarin goes into space, the Americans

are taking countermeasures. They are moving rockets around two, but on the surface of the earth. In the early 1960s, the Americans really put pressure on the Soviets. They put their intermediate ballistic missiles on the very borders of the Soviet. Union. In 1961, the Americans placed medium-range Jupiter ballistic missiles in Turkey. Now, these could easily travel the thousand miles to Moscow. They are an unstoppable dagger pointed at the heart of the USSR. So the Soviets are thinking, could Cuba be the counterbalance here? The Americans had pushed their nukes to the border of the Soviet Union. Why shouldn't the Soviets do the same? So thought Nikita Krischchev, the boss.

the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier, a hardened veteran of World War II, a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad. Now, he was erratic, he was ideologically minded, and he operated with immense personal power, with latitude. He did not have independent advisors who would stand up to him. He did not have to worry about what other politicians in the Soviet Union were thinking at the time. His decisions in this crisis went largely unchallenged by his handpicked Politburo. And this freedom, it had strengths and weaknesses, I think, through this crisis. If he'd had strong independent mind advisors, it might never have come around in the first place. They might have warned him that this was a crazy thing to do.

And as a result, he got the Soviet Union into an existential crisis. He fundamentally misjudged how a constitutional democracy functioned. He mistakenly believed that he could push Kennedy into a corner, and Kennedy, a Democratic leader, would be forced to accept it passively. It was a terrible initial miscalculation. Speaking of which, let's say a little bit about John F. Kennedy, JFK, the American president. He's youthful, he's relatively new U.S. president. He's highly educated in history and international affairs. He's seen a lot of the world.

He's very conscious of the dangers of missteps. He's very conscious the power of these new nuclear weapons, the power that really no former human being had ever wielded in the history of our species. The prospect of nuclear war terrified him, as it should do with all right-thinking people. At home, he faced immense pressure from political hawks on both sides of the aisle and inside his own military, who advocated for aggressive military responses to problems. Now, that's easy when you have elections to win. It's easy when you're not the man sitting in the nuclear hot seat. He really felt the weight of that responsibility.

One of his key advisors is his brother Robert Kennedy. You'll be hearing about him. He's an attorney general. And he served as a core member of the president's crisis management team. And he would later author a very important account of what happened. Like Winston Churchill said, if you want history to be kind to you, make sure you write that history. Robert Kennedy wrote a heavily curated narrative about the events.

that we're going to discuss. Finally, let's not forget, we have the Cubans themselves. We got Fidel Castro, the fiery, charismatic Cuban leader who sought protection from what he believed was an imminent American assault. And he wasn't wrong to assume that. The American government had backed an invasion of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. It was running Operation Mungoos, a massive covert CIA campaign to sabotage the Cuban economy to conduct psychological warfare and orchestrate assassination plots against Castro. Cuban intelligence was repeatedly intercepting reports of these operations, which Castro viewed as a threat to his own life, his regime, and a prelude possibly to full-scale war. With this in mind, Castro aggressively lobbied Christchief. He wanted an ironclad military alliance.

He sort of positioned Cuba as this vulnerable client to the Soviet Union. a symbol of communism right in the heart of the capitalist Western Hemisphere. He wanted to force Nikita Krischoff's hand, but I think it's funny, he sort of overshot the runway a bit, because Castro was not expecting the deployment of nuclear munitions. He'd asked for help, but maybe not that kind of help. Chris Chaff said, fine, you want help, you're going to get help. Okay, let's get into the chronology here. In the late spring and summer of 1962, the Soviet Union launched a massive and highly secretive

military deployment to Cuba under the code name Operation Anadir. Under the guise of shipping commercial goods and basic defensive military aid, Soviet ships carried 40,000 troops and over 100 tactical nuclear weapons. And this is really important here because tactical nuclear weapons are small nuclear weapons. They are designed to be used on the battlefield. They're not strategic. They don't wipe out entire cities. They will smash amphibious forces.

They will evaporate aircraft carriers. They will wipe out assault troops. But that means they're also deployable by people a lot lower down the military command structure. You've got nuclear weapons in the hands of potentially relatively junior people at that point. They're making some big decisions. Also shipped to Cuba are 60 medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles, the ones I've talked about. They've got the nuclear warheads, they're capable of wiping out cities and regions. They are also arriving in Cuba.

By the fall of 1962, Soviet military engineers and Cuban authorities are building launch facilities, silos, command centers, fueling stations hidden within the Cuban country. We've got nine sites, we think, six for R12 medium-range missiles, from an effective range of 1,200 miles, and three sites for R-14 intermediate-range ballistic missiles. They've got a maximum range of about 2,800 miles. That gets you, no problem, to the Pacific coast of the US, all the way from Cuba. So almost overnight, the Soviet Union now possessed the capability to strike the American homeland with ease. Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, L.A., with virtually no warning, given that Cuba sits

100 miles or so off the coast of Florida. Now, let's try and get into Chris Chiff's mindset. Like I mentioned before, he made a fundamental misjudgment here. He didn't quite understand how a constitutional democracy functioned. He didn't understand how America would respond to this. He falsely believed that he could quietly present Kennedy with a fait accompli regarding those missiles. This was like a chess move. One day, he rings up the American president, says, we have now got lots of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Sorry about that. You've got to do what I want you to do. He thought JFK would accept his terms to avoid a nuclear war. Kennedy and the Americans did not respond in this fashion. Assoever, the enemy refused to conform to your plan. It happens time and again

in military history. One thing we should say is it's interesting that both sides have got a severe lack of reliable real-time intelligence on what the other side is really thinking at the top level. Both leaders are moving pretty blindly through this crisis. That's important to say. The Cold War heats up after this. Don't go away. It was an early Sunday morning, October 14, 1962. Major Richard Heiser, clambered into a Lockheed due to high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft in Edwards. Air Force Base in California. He flew south. He watched the sun come up over the Gulf of Mexico. And he rolled to port and headed north to penetrate denied airspace over the island of Cuba.

There was 25% cloud cover that day as he looked down on the sea approaching the island. He was flying at maximum altitude, astonishing. The EU two had reached 72,500 feet. Above him was black. It was space, even though it was daylight. You can even see a few stars at that altitude. The blue of the atmosphere suddenly feels very thin. You can see it curving away on either side of you. He left no contrail behind, so no enemy fighters came up to intercept, check what he was up to. Heiser switched on the camera, and it did his stuff. He captured 928 images, spending about six minutes in Cuban airspace. He then came into land in Florida after seven hours and went for a late breakfast.

The film and his camera was spirited away. It was taken for analysis under armed guard in Washington, D.C. And that film would change the course of history. By lunch on that day, there were the makings of a full-blown crisis. The following morning, first thing, the president was briefed in the White House, because these images clearly detailed the construction of Soviet missile launch sites on Cuba. We need to stop here for a second. There's a fascinating point to make. Kennedy's Defense Secretary,

Robert McNamara, insisted at the time and until his death that this was not actually an enormous military strategic problem. As I said before, the USSR, the Soviets, would be able to cause catastrophic damage in the US in the event of a nuclear war already. They would be able to strike at the USA. They had their intercontinental ballistic missiles. They had their fleets of aircraft. They would be able to do a lot of damage. In some ways, a few dozen extra missiles in Cuba didn't alter that reality. It didn't fundamentally change it.

And so this crisis for the Americans is a lot of. a political problem. Because in a democracy, voters are made promises and they expect results. They expect leaders, roughly speaking, to live up to those promises. Voters also have the power to fire you. And JFK Kennedy had explicitly promised the American people that the Soviets would never be allowed to place nukes in Cuba. He had promised. He had promised, the American people that never would Cuba be able to threaten the USA. It was a central plank of his presidency. This was existential for JFK's career. So doing nothing here is just absolutely not an option. Kennedy immediately calls a secret meeting his closest advisors. He forms the

executive committee of the National Security Council, ex-com. Importantly, his joint chiefs of staff, so his senior military men immediately, unanimously come out in favour of an immediate airstrike followed by an invasion of Cuba. No messing around. Go for it. Kennedy didn't like this. There were a couple of other options. You could just use airstrikes to take out those launch sites, so surgical strikes against those facilities, or what was effectively a blockade, a naval quarantine of Cuba. It was termed a quarantine of sort of legal nicety to avoid violating international law, which asserts that blockade is sort of technically an act of war. The Americans clearly were thinking very kinetically, very aggressively,

they were not going to lie down and take this. And it's that American response that just confuses Khrushchev and immediately derails Khrushchev's plans. He didn't comprehend why the Americans were reacting so explosively to Soviet missiles in Cuba, given that the Soviet had tolerated American missiles in Turkey for years. He just didn't get it. And the strange thing is, behind closed doors, Kennedy sort of agreed with Chris Chaff on a strategic level. There are wonderful White House recordings that reveal that JFK admitted

that the missiles in Cuba didn't actually change the global strategic balance of power that much. And he says on those tapes that the rational move straight away would have been to tell the American public, it doesn't really matter. Don't worry about it. But the domestic political reality just made that impossible. That's not an option for Kennedy. Leaders in Congress, for example, actually are more aggressive than Kennedy at this point, these politicians in Congress, they agreed with the military chiefs. They wanted an invasion. So Kennedy, I think, is hemmed in here. He's hemmed in by senior military leaders, other senior political leaders, by the electorate. When voters find out they're not going to, they're going to demand action. And he and his brother come to

believe, I think, that if they allow those Soviets missiles to remain unchallenged in Cuba, there'll be public outrage, congressional outrage from both parties, it may well lead to his immediate impeachment and removal as president. They spend days discussing it. And then on October the 22nd, they decided on a course of action and the crisis went. public the rest of the world discovered in an absolute jolt what was going on. JFK delivered a dramatic televised address to the American nation and through them the world, officially blowing the lid off this secret Soviet deployment. He announced the discovery of the ballistic sites, of these nuclear sites, and he demanded that Premier Nikita Khrushchev dismantle the weapons. And he announced in

that address that there would be a quarantine. Americans would stop military supplies reaching Cuba. He announces, all ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life, as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade. of 1948. It'll dig at the Soviets there. So humanitarian supplies would be able to get through, but military supplies would be stopped from reaching Cuba. The quarantine was pretty smart for Kennedy. It was pretty smart play. It bought him time, and that was critical. It brought him time with his

own side. He could show his bellicose, military and political colleagues that he was doing something. He was certainly doing something. But he was also giving a little bit more time for diplomacy to work. But alongside that diplomacy, the US was preparing for war. US military forces worldwide were placed on a very heightened state of readiness. US plans for an invasion of Cuba were finalised. So between October the 23rd and October the 25th, the naval quarantine officially took effect in the waters of Cuba. It was a massive operation involved 150 ships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruis, submarines,

The might of the most advanced naval force in the history of the world was gathering to effectively blockade this island in the Caribbean. On Cuba, though, work on those launch pads continued. And this is the point about the Cuban Missile Crisis. There are so many moments when things could have escalated, when things just could have spun out of control. For example, the day after Kennedy's public address, the US Air Force and Navy start flying provocative, extremely dangerous, low-level requirements. reconnaissance flights over Cuba, screaming low over Cuban territory, voodos, US Navy crusaders, taking pictures, but also enraging Cubans, scaring Cubans Soviets on the ground. On at least one occasion, a Soviet-Megg-Mig interceptor, so a fighter bomb was scrambled with

orders to shoot down those American aircraft. But thankfully, that Cuban pilot failed to catch up with the Americans and failed to do so. The effect of a Cuban air-to-air kill of an American aircraft could have been catastrophic. And the rest of the world knew this. The rest of the world was watching, horrified. Humanity's future was now in the hands of a cluster of individuals in distant capitals and a few nervous, potentially trigger-happy fighter pilots saw surface-to-air missile operators in Cuba. It was scary. Countries behaved according to type. The China's, The Chinese backed Cuba and took the opportunity of invading Indian territory in the Himalayas at the same time. The French doubted the veracity of the CIA reconnaissance photos and then had to announce a very public retraction.

The Brits absolutely backed the Americans in public, very nervous that the Americans would abandon Europe to its fate, abandoned Europe to the Soviets. But in private, the Brits thought the Americans had gone absolutely crazy. They'd overreacted terribly about Cuba. Meanwhile, Premier Christchief operated with total authority. Like I say, he's unbound by his Politburo or domestic press. Publicly, he's very fierce at this point. He denounced the quarantine as an act of piracy. He stated that Soviet ships would not respect it.

So it looks like there's going to be a clash on the high seas. It looks like there is going to be a confrontation as Americans try and board Soviet ships and the Soviets do not recognize their authority to do so. But in private, we now know that he recognizes pretty early on that he'd miscalculated. He'd got the American response wrong. And we now know that he ordered those ships not to smash their way through the quarantine, through the blockade.

Ships altered course. They stopped. These were the grounds for hope. And he recognized. have recognised that a US invasion of Cuba would be an apocalyptic event. And he starts working out how he's going to conduct a strategic retreat. He rapidly realized he's going to have to give way here. But, and this is important here, the rest of the world, were not privy to the thoughts inside Krushchev's head. And most importantly of all, the US leadership were not privy to those thoughts.

They did not know that. They thought that Christchief might be up for it. He might go to the brink. He might go beyond it. Hence, the crisis, folks. And this was not helped by communications. There were telegrams. There were hastily written letters. And if you can't look at those letters, they're fascinating. They very much seem to come from Chris Chiff himself. Like Donald Trump's social posts, they are unmediated. There's no advisors. giving those a quick edit. He is writing those letters. He's repeating himself. There are typos in those letters. He is writing them at all times day and night. This is intensely personal. At 10 a.m., Washington Time on the 26th of October. Strategic Air Command raised U.S. forces to defense condition two, DefCon 2. This is the highest state of readiness that the U.S. military can adopt short of war. only time in US history this has happened. And what that means, well, the real world consequences. Massive B-52 bombers, with their hulls full of nuclear warheads, they are now maintaining a standing airborne alert. They are circling the skies just outside Soviet airspace, but within striking distance. Dozens of smaller fighter bomber jets are sitting on airstrips with the keys and ignitions, their systems spun up, pilots suited and booted, they're on 15-minute readiness,

also carrying nuclear warheads. But, and here's a very interesting thing here, the Soviet nuclear forces, again, we now know they did not change their posture. So Krischchief was still talking tough, but the Soviet nuclear strike forces were not brought up to a corresponding state of readiness. Alongside Krischief's orders to the ships approaching Cuba, this was a hint that the Soviets did not intend for the Cold War to go hot at this point. The problem here, folks, is that when it comes to global thermonuclear war, there is no room for error. Any mistake, miscalculation, accident, moment of rashness, anything can be catastrophic.

So sure, Kennedy's getting intel reports. Oh, it looks like the Soviet arsenal is not gearing up. it does not look like it's preparing for nuclear strike. But at the same time, by the way, over here, Khrushchev is making erratic bellicose noises. Things are hotting up in Cuba. There are plenty of unknowns. You've also got the Arctic airspace

teeming with planes manned by teenagers with hulls full of nuclear weapons. Beneath the oceans, you've got submariners getting hot and bothered, oxygen-deprived, antsy. There are lots of variables. communication was archaic. That same day, on the 26th of October, Krushchev sent a long and emotional letter to JFK. It seems like it was sent late at night in Moscow time. Remember, there is no hotline, there is no voice communication between Washington and Moscow at this point.

He's using letters in the space age, wild. In this letter, Krushchev offers a compromise. He says the Soviet Union will withdraw the nuclear weapons from Cuba, in exchange for a public American pledge never to invade the island. But before Kennedy could officially respond to this offer, the following day on the 27th, Chris Chf broadcasted a second, much harsher message live over radio Moscow, which seemingly sort of went back on what he'd offered in this letter. And in this public message, he was much more angry, he's more aggressive and he raised the stakes. He demanded that the US would also commit publicly to remove those Jupiter missiles from the Soviet border, the ones inside Turkey. So there are mixed signals coming out of Moscow. All that helps to make

the 27th of October the day on which the crisis reaches its zenith. It's not just the rhetoric coming out of Moscow. It's plenty of other things as well. This is arguably the most dangerous 24-hour period in human history, and terrifyingly, with the stakes being the survival of really human civilization, potentially our species, both world leaders temporarily sort of lost control over what was going on at the front line. The Cold War heats up after this, don't go away. Now we've got a situation where, as so often in war, certain the build-up to wars, momentum on the periphery is threatening to overtake the caution of the Imperial Center where people are still trying to pump the brakes. It was mid-morning on that momentous Saturday.

Another US recon flight took off this time from Orlando in Florida. At the controls was Major Rudolph Anderson, much decorated. He was the strategic Rekky Wing's top U-2 pilot. He's clocked up more than a thousand hours of flight time in the aircraft. He's penetrated Cuban airspace, and at 1018 that morning, two Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles, the S-75 Davinas screamed into the air. For five seconds, the solid fuel boosters accelerated the missile upwards, at which point fuel spent, they detach and fall back to Earth.

The second stage fires for another 20 seconds, at which point that projectile is travelling over Mac 3, 2,000 miles per hour. At its tip, a 200-kilogram warhead packed with high explosives, designed to fragment and send lethal shards of metal in a tight cloud with a radius of 250 meters. To allow for some inaccuracy, you tend to fire those SAMs, those surface-to-air missiles, in salvos. This time, two of them. Anderson now had these two missiles, these two state-of-the-art, surface-to-air missiles, reaching up into the sky to claw him out of it. The warheads detonated when their proximity fuses detected the fabric of the aircraft. One of them, we don't know which one, peppered its fuselage with shrapnel traveling at supersonic speeds.

Some penetrated his helmet and pressure suit. He may have been killed instantly, or he may have died a few seconds later as the cabin depressurized, as oxygen ran out. The remains of his body, strapped to the remnant of that aircraft, crashed on Cuban soil. As it turns out, thankfully, Anderson would be the only military fatality

of the Cuban missile crisis. But at the time, this certainly felt like it could be the first of many, many millions. So the background to the launch of those surface-to-air missiles is interesting. Local Soviet officers tried to contact their commander-in-chief in Havana for authorization, but he was asleep, or he was ill, or he was hung over, or he was a mixture of all of them. And so they were unable to wake him up, they were unable to get authorization,

and so they took matters into their own hands and fired those missiles. Simultaneously, another American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, piloted by Charles Maltzby in a very different part of the world, he'd lost his bearings and accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace over Siberia. Now, Washington was very worried at this point. The Kremlin would assume that this was a final target mapping flight sent minutes before an American first nuclear strike. So it's all happening, folks, and it didn't stop.

That day, I'll tell you what. Later that afternoon, more American, low-level aircraft this time. There's a carrier-based crusaders. I love their nickname, the last of their gunfighters. They are making a pass over Cuban territory, and they are fired upon. None of them are damaged, thankfully. It is now a shooting war. The sparks continued to fly, and one of those sparks could easily have ignited history's biggest mound of gunpowder. The scariest moment for many was about to take place in the Sigaso. where American warships are located a Soviet nuclear submarine, B-59.

A couple of weeks before, on the 1st of October, B-59 and three other Foxtrot-class submarines had slipped out of Kola bay and into the Barents Sea in the Arctic. Nuclear torpedoes were aboard, lying in their cradles, sealed orders resting in their safes. A couple of weeks later, on that fateful day, Saturday, October the 27th, that B-59 was now now quite near the coast of Cuba, and it was caught up in the middle of the American blockade. The vessel had been submerged for 18 hours to avoid being spotted. Oxygen was running low. The air was now saturated with carbon dioxide and methane. It was causing lethargy. It was causing confusion. Temperatures had soared to 60 degrees

centigrade. Crew members were staggering about the vessel in their underwear. The captain, Savitsky, was very stressed. He was very stressed. He was very, very fatigued. And now US vessels began dropping, well, like hand grenades, they're sort of practice depth charges, small explosive devices, to try and force her to the surface. So you've got concussion explosions ringing about the heads of the panic crew, the hulls shaking from the force of the blasts. Did the Soviets realize that these were non-lethal, sort of signaling, practice munitions, there are many versions of what happened next. Really, we've only known about this whole instant for just a couple of decades. It all came out after the end of the Soviet Union.

Some scholars now believe that this was the closest humanity ever got to nuclear war. Others disagree. They say that luckily the controls held. I'll talk you through it. One Soviet eyewitness says that there was a fierce debate among the senior officers. We thought, that's it. The end. The totally exhausted and Salvici became furious. He summoned the officer who was assigned the nuclear torpedo and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. Maybe the war has started up there. While we were doing somersaults here, he screamed.

We're going to blast them. We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not disgrace our navy. In this account, the other officers managed to calm the captain down before the torpedo was readied. Now, by the way, that torpedo had an explosive yield around about that of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Thankfully, it was not fired at the American fleet.

But there's another episode. What happened next is just as scary. With only about a few minutes left until the submarine's batteries were going to run down and the crew would really need oxygen, the captain did bring the submarine to the surface. We don't think at that point that the nuclear torpedo was in the tube, ready to be fired.

don't think it was. But as the submarine's ghostly profile rose through the surface of the sea, remember it's nighttime, it's dark, you've got, it causes quite a stir among the American ships nearby. The submarine has surfaced and Captain Salvitsky and another senior officer, a very important one called Vasili Archipov, they open the hatch, they climb onto the conning tower. So these exhausted submariners, they come up into this night scene. an overwhelming scene because you've got American naval vessels around. You've got searchlights blinding them and they can't see properly. And you've got a primitive, pretty old-fashioned exchange between signalmen as they're trying to use these lights to communicate with each other, announce

their intent. It's all overwhelming. And then it seems you've suddenly got an aircraft, noisy, low flying, screaming overhead, it's dropping incendiary flares to mark out the submarine's position and perhaps taking aerial photography. But, to the Russian crew, that looks a lot like a dive bomber. It looks a lot like they're under attack. You've got burning flares in the water. You've got lights being blasted, noise. All of it seems to have given the impression to this very stressed Russian submarine commander that this Soviet submarine was under attack. According to one account, determined not to go down without a fight. Captain Salvitsky dives back down the ladder into the submarine, barking another order to prepare

nuclear-tipped torpedoes. And here's the really incredible bit. With the world now potentially seconds away from nuclear Armageddon, the captain was delayed as he climbs down into the bowels of his submarine by a signalman who's in the way. He's got trapped on the ladder and leading up to the submarine's conning tower. And this gave a little breathing space, a bit of time for the other senior officer, Akapov, to just gaze out at the scene and get his bearings and spot the fact the American vessels are furiously signaling, they want to talk, that the flares are not in fact an attack,

and Arkapov uses his authority to cancel the launch command. Perhaps World War III had been avoided by, well, whatever the width of that signalman's back side. who got jammed in the conning tower. If he'd been sleeker, if the captain had been fast down that ladder, then perhaps that nuclear torpedo could have been loaded, and perhaps it could have been fired on that night in the Sargasso Sea. Now, other historians have pointed out that luckily and sensibly,

Soviet doctrine did require three officers on board to be an agreement before nuclear weapons were deployed. They all had a key without which the weapon could not be fired. officer, the executive officer and the political officer, there was a KGB officer on board as well. He actually slept next to the torpedo and never left it. And that was the most unpleasant place on earth to sleep. It was freezing cold. But anyway, that's where he slept. And so there were safeguards, but even so, we may well have got much close to a nuclear launch there that I'm comfortable with. And on that day, of all days. I interviewed the renowned historian Sahey Ploki on this particular a moment in the Cold War, and he does maintain that had Kennedy received word, that an American

naval detachment had been vaporized by a Soviet nuclear-tipped torpedo, well, it would have been war. There would have been no restraint. He would have responded with massive nuclear retaliation against Cuba, mainland, Russia, triggering global thermonuclear war. Because Kennedy spent that day fighting his own battle in his own White House. He and his advisors, were digesting the news that that you two had been shot down over Cuba. And when news reaches Kennedy, someone in the situation room said, that's it, they fired the first shot. We are at war with Cuba, we're at war with the Soviets. Kennedy's military advisors strongly urge a military response at this point.

And this is the moment for which he deserves enormous credit. He overrules them. He uses his possibly last piece of presidential or, authority to overrule his military advisers. Why did the shooting down of that aircraft matter so much? Well, the Americans knew that the surface-to-air batteries in Cuba were under the control of the Soviets, not the Cubans. And so they assumed that by firing those missiles, that was a clear statement of intent from the Soviets. It meant that the Soviets had chosen war. They wanted war. the Americans had no idea, and this is a big intelligence failure, they had no idea that

Krushchev was absolutely furious about that U-2 being shot down, about that Soviet surface-to-missar launch. Remember, I keep saying, there is no direct communication between the two leaders. Their letters are taking hours to get to each other and be translated and responded to. That's actually why Christchief has started broadcasting on Radio Moscow. He started making radio broadcast because he thought it might be a quicker way for the Americans to actually get messages rather than going through all the diplomatic channels. Anyway, by the evening of the 27th of October, the world is on the brink of war. And by the way, that's before anyone in Washington in the White House even learned about the fracas in the Sargasso Sea.

No one knows about what's going on on that Soviet submarine until decades later. JFK is still holding the line against his military advisors, and he decides on one more diplomatic gamble. He's going to ignore Khrushchev's harsh language, bellicose language. He's going to home in on that first letter that Chris Chiff sent, saying that he would back down in return for a non-invasion of Cuba pledge. And so that very same night, that very same night, while submarine B-59 and its American pursuers are tiptoeing around nuclear catastrophe, JFK sends his brother, Robert Kennedy, to meet the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrinnin. They were alone. It was a private meeting. The Soviet ambassador later reports that Bobby Kennedy was deeply stressed. Bobby Kennedy states unambiguously that the Soviets had had to agree to remove those missiles within 24 hours, or the US would invade Cuba.

Now, between themselves, RFK, Bobby Kennedy, is saying there's a bonus. We will give you a concession. We will secretly dismantle those nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey. But that part of the deal has to remain totally confidential, totally secret, because if anyone found out, it would be JFK's domestic political ruin. And this is just totally fascinating. Remarkably, Bobby Kennedy told the ambassador that his brother, the president of the United States of America,

was under enormous pressure from the military to use force against Cuba. And that, I'm quoting, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will, as the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. That's heavy stuff. Bobby Kennedy implored Chris Chaff to accept Kennedy's proposed agreement. The following day, Sunday the 28th of October, Kennedy's getting more details of the close calls from the day before.

They're now making their way out the chain of command. He is hearing that in Cuba, there is now, well, in some ways a state of war. Cuban forces are just firing upon US military aircraft as soon as they see them. and his brother Robert Kennedy reports the mood that day. We had not abandoned all hope, but what hope there was now rested with Krushchev's revising his course within the next few hours? It was a hope, not an expectation.

So the expectation for the Americans is that they are going to invade Cuba in the next 2448 hours. But remember, they did not know that there were over 100 tactical nuclear weapons on Cuba. If the Americans launched that amphibious assault, Chrischev believed that Soviet and Cuban troops would use those weapons, rather than be steam-roled by the Americans. The American invading forces would be vaporized. It would be nuclear war. Christchief had reached the point where events were almost outside his control.

He was alone in his dachar, his country house, he's outside Moscow. He asked for no advice. He did not need the acquiescence or even the involvement of the Politburo, senior politicians in the Soviet Union. One man is now really wrestling with the future of humanity. Thankfully, that man made the right decision. Sense prevailed. Chris Chaff took the deal. He acted on what he'd been told by the Soviet ambassador in Washington. He took the deal that was offered by Bobby Kennedy. He took the last-ditch offer. At 9 a.m., Washington time on the Sunday, Christchief went back on Radio Moscow. He said, the Soviet government has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you

describe as offensive and their crating and return to the Soviet Union. Union. Kennedy grabbed onto this offer. He wrote to Khrushchev and announced that the US would, in turn, respect the inviolability of the Cuban borders and its sovereignty. Many of Kennedy's advisor disagreed, if you can believe it. And that's, by the way, given that no one knew about the Turkish missile deal. That was kept absolutely secret. Later that same day, on that Sunday, the former president Eisenhower, rang Kennedy and Kennedy lied straight to him, straight to his face or straight to his ears. He promised he had given no undertaking to remove the Turkish missiles. That was totally untrue.

But this skullduggery was enough to end the catastrophic escalation. It did bring to an end the most dangerous month in US history. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba. Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba and respect. its sovereignty. It is worth noting that both Christchheff and Kennedy had completely bypassed Cuba Castro in these negotiations. He wasn't consulted any of it on the withdrawal of Soviet missiles, and he had no part in setting the terms of the deal. Castro was left furious, and he realized that in the grand strategy of the world's superpowers, Cuba would be treated as a pawn,

rather than equal partner. Ever since, our narrative of that time has been shaped really by the accounts left by some of the important people in charge, particularly Robert Kennedy. He posthumously published 13 days. And in that book, he painted JFK in his inner circle as enlightened, flawless crisis managers who stared down the military and forced a neat Soviet climb down. But declassified Soviets accounts, more recently released White House recordings and recently opened KGB archives, exposed this account. I think they exposed the 13 days narrative, Bobby Kennedy's account, as a curated self-serving myth, put together partly to launch Robert Kennedy's future

presidential campaign. The resolution was a good old-fashioned compromise. Kennedy, Kennedy did secretly capitulate to Chris Chaff's demand to dismantle those American missiles in Turkey. And to protect JFK from domestic political ruin, this portion of the deal was fiercely hidden from the American public. It was hidden from Congress. It was hidden from Kennedy's own presidential predecessors, as I said. And now when we look back at those razor-thin margins in October 1962, I think it's unsettling. there's a realization that, yes, the system held, but potentially by the thinnest of threads. The finely tuned strategies of Kennedy's fancy Ivy League advisors,

the iron-fisted authority of Crustchess Kremlin, both fractured in the white heat of real-world chaotic events. We may owe our survival to events as marginal as a Soviet signalman getting physically stuck, in a submarine hatch, as US fighter bombers being able to outrun the surface-to-air fire that screamed into the air into their slip streams. We may all still be here because a crew of sweating, stinking, terrified submariners peered into the literal abyss of thermonuclear inolation and had enough sense to pull back from the brink.

The two critical players, Christchief and Kennedy, they step back, I think because of a gut-wrenching fear on a personal level. They both belonged to a generation that had witnessed appalling military destruction. They'd witnessed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They'd seen the reports, the intelligence, on the tests that were taking place through the 1950s. The mind-blowingly massive hydrogen bomb test, like that of the US Castle Bravo and the Soviet Zah Bomba, the largest device ever detonated by humans, to today. They were genuinely terrified of the weapons they controlled. They had seen the official projections that perhaps a third to a half of human beings could be killed after they issued

launch orders. And thankfully, there was dialogue after the crisis between leaderships. A Washington-Moscow Hotline was installed. That's a great idea. And events led to a partial nuclear test ban that would be agreed in the years that followed. There were talks about going much further. But more serious d'aunt never happened. It was derailed. And here's the dark bit about the Cuban missile crisis in the years that followed. Elements of the US military embodied by the fire-eating Curtis Lamey, the Air Force boss at the time, they continued to believe that Kennedy had been defeated. He had been humiliated over Cuba. Curtis Lamee called it America's greatest defeat ever. 25 years later, he clung to the point of view that Cuba should have been invaded.

That's a point of view that would certainly have precipitated nuclear war. On the Soviet side, Khrushchev paid for his compromise with his career. Within two years, he was ousted in a palace coup. He was replaced by the more hardline Leonid Brezhnev. Sure, in Khrushchev's case, his erratic decision-making, which got the Soviets into the crisis in the first place, was part of it, but to many backing down was his greatest crime. That was unforgivable. The Soviet Union appeared to have been humiliated. It all just shows that the siren song of war is strong.

It lures us onto the razor-sharp rocks of conflict, where the only certainty is blood and destruction. Cuba was one of several nemeses, perhaps the most severe. humanity's continued existence is threatened by our astonishing scientific advances that have created planet-destroying arsenals of weapons and put them in the hands of human beings with all the frailties and eccentricities of our cave-dwelling ancestors who once wielded sticks and stones. I think we need to keep channeling that visceral fear that Kennedy and Christian. Jeff both felt. All contemporary politicians, all of us in the public, still need to feel that. The sanitised myth of the crisis and its resolution has lured us into a false sense of security when it

comes to nuclear weapons. And the other striking thing is that in reality the nuclear age never ended. I remember in the 1990, everyone popping cork saying, well, that's the end of that, but the weapons endured. And now modern powers, including the US and Russia and China and France and Great Britain, others, are actively participating in new arms races, nuclear arsenals. They are under the euphemism of modernisation programmes, but I do wonder whether we've truly learned the lessons of 1962 or whether they have been forgotten. We were lucky to survive the 20th century. We need more than luck to guarantee our continued survival. And on that, cheerful note, enjoy the rest of your day, folks. Thank you very much joining us for this episode,

Dan Snow's History. Remember to smash the buttons, like, subscribe to the channel, and you won't miss any more of our episodes. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era? And you can even hear the voice of Richard the Third. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe.