There was also a movie, "Thirteen Days" which was about the Cuban Missle Crisis. And it really makes me wonder, just how close did the United States and the former Soviet Union come to nuclear war? What kind of a deal did Cuba and the Soviet Union have going on where Castro was allowing Russian missles into his country? Would Castro have eventually used these nuclear weapons on the United States?
The establishment of missile sites in Cuba was the Soviet Union's response to American missile placements in Turkey. The quid pro quo of the dismantling was that the US take theirs out too. As for an attack, it would never have gotten that far. The US already had planned an air bombardment of Cuba if the Soviet Union did not capitulate. Where that would have led is anyone's guess.
What a lot of people are not aware of is the fact that a Third World War was probably avoided by the action of one officer on a Soviet Submarine. During the crisis, in the Caribbean, an American destroyer challenged the submarine which refused to surface. The destroyer proceeded to depth-charge the submarine in an effort to bring it to the surface, and the response of the Soviet officers was to discuss whether to sink the destroyer. However it needed three senior officers to agree to the sinking and one of them declined saying that it could start a Nuclear exchange. He was recently named in the U.K. press but unfortunately I have lost the reference. Thank God for that officer. If they had all agreed then imagine what the response would have been by the U.S.! Incidentally the submarine was able to escape from the clutches of the destroyer.
Just to add to my comments above, I have just found the relevant article and the Russian officer concerned was named Vasily Arkhipov, and he was an officer on submarine B59. Apparently the captain, Valentin Savitsky and another officer wanted to fire a nuclear torpedo, but the Soviet rules of engagement, required three officers to agree. Arkhipov didn't. He later became a Vice Admiral in the Soviet nay and he died three years ago at the age of 63.
