Foreign Policy Magazine

Wednesday,   May 22,   2013 Follow

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the nerve-wracking peak of the Cold War. To commemorate this event, Foreign Policy is tweeting the Cuban missile crisis in real time, chronicling the days, hours, and minutes when the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction.

Michael Dobbs is the author of a bestselling book about the Cuban missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. In a cover review in the New York Times book review, Richard Holbrooke wrote that the book was "filled with … insights that will change the views of experts and help inform a new generation of readers." 

Dobbs became interested in the missile crisis while covering the Soviet Union's collapse for the Washington Post between 1988 and 1993. He has interviewed dozens of participants in "Operation Anadyr" -- the Soviet code name for the Cuba operation -- along with missile crisis veterans from the United States and Cuba. Together with newly disclosed archival documents and a trove of raw U.S. intelligence data, these sources enabled him to piece together the minute-by-minute story of how the world came to the edge of nuclear destruction, from a variety of different viewpoints.

New revelations in One Minute include the Soviet plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, the extraordinary story of an American U-2 spy plane that went missing over the Soviet Union at the peak of the crisis, the shootdown of another U-2 spy plane over Cuba, the first detailed account of  the handling and movement of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba, and startling disclosures about the U.S. naval blockade.

Rachel Dobbs is an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, studying a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She is assisting with the research and administration surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis +50 project. She has spent the last two years interning in the Risk Consultancy Division of KPMG and (incongruously) as a junior reporter for the Sunday Island, a national newspaper based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.