One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Post, December 8, 1962.

'felt like laughing': Wilson OH, JFKL.

'a rose growing out': Abel, 180.

between 'one in three': Sorensen, Kennedy, 705.

'a charade': JCS Poole notes.

'an insincere proposal': NSAW Cuba.

'It's the greatest defeat': Beschloss, 544.

'Son of a bitch!': Franqui, 194, Thomas, 524. For the Castro account, see Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 214.

Alekseev had been up late: Alekseev interview, CNN CW.

The report reaching the North American: For a full account of this incident, see Sagan, 127-33. Sagan and other writers have given an apparently erroneous time: NORAD logs give the time as 1608Z, or 11:08 a.m. Washington time ? Sagan Collection, NSAW.

'Everyone knows who were': Summary record of ExComm meeting, FRUS, Vol. XI, 283.

'I don't think either of them': Sorensen interview, CNN CW.

'a victory for us': Reeves, 424.

'At last, I am going': Instructions to Dobrynin, October 28, 1962, NSAW; Dobrynin, 89–90.

'All of them?': Gribkov and Smith, Operation ANADYR, 72.

'Nikita, Nikita': Mario Vargas Llosa report, Le Monde, November 23, 1962.

'watches, boots': CIA memorandum, The Crisis: USSR/Cuba, November 10, 1962, CREST.

'Some experts and technicians': Telegram from Czechoslovak ambassador, October 31, 1962, Havana 2002, vol. 2.

'First you urged me': Yesin et al., Strategicheskaya Operatsiya Anadyr, 57.

'to tighten your belts': K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 274.

'This is the night': RFK, 110.

AFTERWORD

'dazzled the world': Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 851.

'Adlai wanted a Munich': Alsop and Bartlett, 'In Time of Crisis,' Saturday Evening Post, December 8, 1962.

'a dove from the start': Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 529.

'a thought of breathtaking ingenuity': Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 828.

'the enormous tension that gripped us': Dobrynin, 83.

Most books on the missile crisis: An exception is The Limits of Safety (1993), by Scott Sagan, a study about accidents involving nuclear weapons.

'100 per cent successful': History of 4080th Strategic Wing, October 1962, FOIA.

'an inner sense of confidence': Alsop and Bartlett, 'In Time of Crisis.'

a policy of 'progressive squeeze-and-talk': Kaplan, 334.

'deeply influenced': Clark M. Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Random House, 1991), 411.

'Very gung-ho fellows': Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 82, cited in Eliot A. Cohen, 'Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,' The National Interest (Winter 1985-86).

'You got away with it': Reeves, 424.

'bright and energetic': Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 548.

'incompatible with Soviet practice': NIE 85-3-62, September 19, 1962; for postmortem, see February 4, 1963, memo from President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in McAuliffe, 362-71.

'We all inhabit': JFK Commencement Address at American University, June 10, 1963.

'plain dumb luck': Reeves, 425; see also 'Acheson Says Luck Saved JFK on Cuba,' WP, January 19, 1969.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Dobbs was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at the University of York, with fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. He is a reporter for The Washington Post, where he spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. His Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for nonfiction. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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