Secrets in the Cuban Missile Crisis

"History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside."
- President John F. Kennedy

Hardly befitting its numbing nomenclature, the Cold War was on of the most trying and troublesome periods in world history. The antagonism between the NATO Alliance and the nations of the Warsaw Pact on more than one occasion forced the world to confront the possibility of nuclear annihilation. For the first time in the history of humanity, the apocalypse existed not as a theoretical possibility or rhetorical ploy but instead as a practical policy outcome and one to be vigorously avoided if at all possible. The fifty year ideological and military showdown saw its share of potential flash points, including crises in Berlin, Saigon and Kabul. However, at no other point did the nuclear outcome seem as likely as it did during what is widely considered to be the height of the Cold War, the thirteen days in 1962 known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.