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invasion of Cuba, as several of his advisers urged. Instead, he took his brother’s advice and established a naval blockade, or a ‘quarantine’, as he called it, of Cuba to prevent further introduction of missiles or supplies. He also demanded that Khrushchev ‘eliminate’ the missiles that were already in place. Khrushchev was unprepared for such a response. He wrote to Kennedy that he was creating a ‘serious threat to peace and security’ and demanded that he ‘renounce’ his quarantine decision. The President’s response was to raise the level of SAC’s alert status to DEFCON 2, just below that of war, and to reply to Khrushchev firmly that US policy would stick. Khrushchev backed down, at least briefly. In a rambling personal letter to Kennedy, written on 26 October, Khrushchev offered a way through: he would remove the missiles from Cuba if the Americans would agree not to invade the island. Even as Kennedy’s advisers were discussing the letter, a second arrived from Khrushchev, dated the 27th, adding the condition that the United States remove the Jupiters from Turkey. (Khrushchev agreed not to invade Turkey.) The Americans were vexed by the addition, and, even though the Jupiters were strategically meaningless, Kennedy objected to their equation with the missiles in Cuba. Then, at noon, a US U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a Russian missile battery, killing the pilot.

‘The smell of scorching hung in the air,’ as Khrushchev described it later. He had gone too far, he concluded, and the missiles in Cuba must come out. Robert Kennedy, representing the President, met the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that night. Somberly, he told Dobrynin that, ifthe missiles were not removed from Cuba voluntarily, the United States would take them out. In return for Soviet cooperation, Kennedy would pledge not to invade Cuba. And, while it would not say so publicly, the administration would agree to extract the Turkish Jupiters once the crisis had passed. The next day, Khrushchev sent written acceptance of these terms. He had ‘given a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive’, he wrote to Kennedy. The most serious nuclear crisis of the Cold War had passed.59

At the time, of course, the principals involved did not know that their crisis would remain the worst. Still, a certain sobriety set in on both sides. The Kennedy administration did not abandon its efforts to get rid of Castro’s government, or Castro himself, and it continued to build nuclear weapons. Nor did Khrushchev and the Soviets stop blustering— Khrushchev boasted to the Supreme Soviet in December that the ‘forces of peace and socialism’ had ‘imposed peace’ on the world—or persisting in their arms build-up. But observers of both Kennedy and Khrushchev noted a new reflectiveness in both men, who as adversaries had together come to the edge of a nuclear catastrophe. On 10 June 1963, in his commencement address at the American University in Washington, Kennedy expressed willingness to ‘make the world safe for diversity’ and announced that the United States would stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, as long as the Russians would refrain too. The speech was greeted with enthusiasm by Khrushchev, who would label it ‘the best speech by any president since Roosevelt’, presumably Franklin. The two nations subsequently agreed on a ‘Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water’, more commonly called the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963 and Khrushchev’s ouster the following October did not stop their nations creeping away from the brink. In 1953, with the test of thermonuclear bombs by both sides in the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists showed, ominously, that there were but two minutes to midnight. At the end of 1963, it was twelve minutes to midnight, and the Test Ban gave hope that time would continue to run backward. The hope, alas, was premature. As ever, the United States and the Soviet Union were just