The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
A National Security Archive Documents Reader
Edited by Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh
Ordering information for this book is available at the W.W. Norton & Co. website. Or by phone:
800-233-4830 (U.S.)
717-346-2029 (Outside U.S.)
 
Read original Washington Post coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis as it unfolded 40 years ago this week
 
The Cuban government's La Crisis de Octubre: una visión política 40 años después. "The Crisis of October: A political vision 40 years later" (In Spanish)
 
Press releases, selected documents, photographs, audio clips and other material from the historic conference in Havana.
Formerly secret documents from U.S., Cuban, Soviet and East Bloc archives.
Listen in on White House intelligence briefings and hear the actual voices of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and other advisers during meetings of the President's Executive Committee (ExComm).
Images of Soviet missile and antiaircraft installations taken by U-2 spyplanes and U.S. Navy low-level reconnaissance aircraft in October-November 1962 used to brief President Kennedy and his advisers.
Documents, naval charts and other declassified records on the U.S. hunt for Soviet submarines during the most dangerous days of the crisis.
Two day-by-day, minute-by-minute chronologies of events surrounding the missile crisis.
Read the analysis of contemporary historians as they sift through the historiography and more recent evidence to learn the lessons of history.

The Declassified History.
At midday, and again in the early evening of October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy called together a group of his closest advisers at the White House. Late the night before, the CIA had produced detailed photo intelligence identifying Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction on the island of Cuba, some ninety miles off the Florida coast; now the president and his men confronted the dangerous decision of how the United States should respond . . . [More]

The Most Dangerous Moment.
If the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous passage of the Cold War, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the evening of Saturday, 27 October 1962, when the resolution of the crisis—war or peace— appeared to hang in the balance . . . [More]

Annals of Blinksmanship.
Now that the Cold War is over, its history has become a growth industry, though in truth there was no great shortage of historical analysis even while the war was going on. Today, however, one finds a certain generational divide as perhaps the salient characteristic of the enterprise . . . [More]
Turning History on Its Head.
For nearly forty years most American accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis of have left Cuba out of the story. With the blockbuster film "Thirteen Days" the story now ignores the Soviet Union as well. The film turns history on its head and drums into our heads exactly the wrong lessons of the crisis. . . [More]