13 Links For 13 Days
OpenCanada considers the Cuban Missile Crisis 50 years on.
This October marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From October 16th to 28th in 1962, the two superpowers came far closer to nuclear war than the “deterrent” of mutually assured destruction was supposed to permit. For international relations theorists (or at least for those interested in decision-making models) the Cuban Missile Crisis remains the ultimate case study, and worthy of analysis even fifty years later. For historians, it still stands as one of the most dramatic episodes in recent memory. And to the world today, it seems to be one of the few historical examples that may help leaders defuse a nuclear faceoff between the United States and Iran.
Here are 13 links to coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thirteen links for the 13 days the world hovered at the edge of an existential – not just a fiscal – cliff.
- Special PBS programs on the crisis: Three Men Go to War and The Man Who Saved the World, an episode of Secrets of the Dead. (You can find the NYT’s commentary on these here.)
- The NYT archives from October and November 1962: the headline stories.
- The Belfer Center’s interactive timeline of the crisis.
- Fred Kaplan at Slate with 4 lessons that the CMC can teach us for dealing with today’s crises.
- Newly declassified documents published by the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project and James Hershberg at the Wilson Center on new historical sources.
- CMC expert Graham Allison on this episode’s historical significance.
- James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang on the lessons we can take from the past and Fen Hampson on what the crisis meant for Canada.
- Foreign Policy’s in depth coverage, plus since the start of the anniversary, following @missilecrisis62 provided a play-by-play of the crisis via real-time tweets from Foreign Policy and Michael Dobbs.
