The Cuban Missile Crisis revisited : an international collection of documents, from the Bay of Pigs to the brink of nuclear war [electronic resource].

Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest LLC, 2007-

Access is available to the Yale community.

More than 40 years after the event, the Cuban missile crisis remains the single most important episode in the complex and contentious history of the Cold War. For over twenty years, the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project has aimed to centralize as many of the documentary pieces of the puzzle as possible, and to look beyond the conventionally understood "13 days" of the missile crisis in October 1962, into the policies, operations and conflicts that preceded and precipitated this famous tri-power confrontation, as well as the events that took place during the crisis and in its aftermath. This compilation of documents contains some extraordinary new documentation on the Cuban missile crisis that will enhance historical research for years to come. Recently released Russian records will shed light on the decision making of the Soviet Politburo, on previously unknown military deployments of tactical nuclear weapons, and on the type and tenor of communications with Fidel Castro. Cuban documentation will provide historians with a better understanding of Castro's independence during and after the crisis, as well as on the capabilities of Cuban intelligence to track and counter the covert efforts of the Kennedy administration to roll back the Cuban revolution. The U.S. documents in this collection provide new insight into what went wrong at the Bay of Pigs, the decision making process of Kennedy's Executive Committee, strategic planning of the U.S. military, and previously unidentified confrontations with Soviet forces.

English

December 10, 2008

National Security Archive (U.S.)