Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomaytotomato | Hacker News Reader

The Cuban missile crises I would say was a lot less precarious than Able Archer or the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm alert - which was averted, by, ahem - an engineer!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

View on HN

There is an incredibly good minute-by-minute account of the Cuban crisis: "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" - it covers a lot of areas that aren't often mentioned such as the U2 flight at the North Pole going astray or the Soviet nuclear cruise missile teams targetting Guantanamo that taken together with the more well known events make it seem remarkable to me that we survived.

In first 20 minutes of the documentary The Fog of War Robert McNamara goes over the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Even he admits it came down to luck.

His meeting with Cuba in the 90s and the new information presented that McNamara didn’t have during the crisis was especially sobering. McNamara ended the meeting early because he was “unprepared” to learn there were missiles already operational and authorization was already granted to launch if the Cuban build sites were struck.

Didn't watch it. So what about the million dollar question: would nuclear (or global) war have started if the US didn't have nuclear weapons? I mean, it's the basis of the US nuclear strategy after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com