Forceful Persuasion
Forceful Persuasion

Author: Alexander L. George

Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 9781878379146

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George examines seven cases--from Pearl Harbor to the Persian Gulf--in which the United States has used coercive diplomacy in the past half-century.

The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited
The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited

Author: James A. Nathan

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780312097257

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The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited provides a comprehensive overview of the new materials recently released by the Soviet Union, United States, and Cuba. The authors have all had a major role in bringing to light either significant reevaluations of the crisis, or in some cases, truly startling challenges to the conventional wisdom surrounding much of the crisis. This important collection, edited by a long-time student of the crisis, is a coherent, original, and up-to-date work that bears on a moment when the world, for good cause, held its breath in fear that the morning might bring the apocalypse.

Cordon of Steel
Cordon of Steel

Author: Curtis A. Utz

Publisher:

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13: 9781410221230

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This study is a dramatic example of how the U.S. Navy's multipurpose ships and aircraft, flexible task organization, and great mobility enabled President Kennedy to protect national interests in one of the most serious confrontations of the Cold War. Curtis A. Utz is currently a historian in the Naval Historical Center's Contemporary History Branch.

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Author: Serhii Plokhy

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 0393540820

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"The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Sad and Luminous Days
Sad and Luminous Days

Author: James G. Blight

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2007-02-08

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1461642205

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In October 1962 school children huddled under their desks and diplomats feverishly negotiated as the world sat on the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous moment in modern history and resulted in a changed worldview for the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. In tracing the developments of the missile crisis and beyond, Sad and Luminous Days presents and interprets a heretofore unavailable (and largely unknown) secret speech that Castro delivered to the Cuban leadership in 1968. In it, Castro reflects on the crisis and reveals the distrust and bitterness that characterized Cuban-Soviet relations in 1968. Blight and Brenner frame the annotated speech with an examination of the missile crisis itself, and an analysis of Cuban-Soviet relations between 1962–1968, ending with an epilogue that highlights the lessons the missile crisis offers us in the current search for security and a stable world order. Sad and Luminous Days sheds new light on Cuban-Soviet relations and should be required reading not only for Cold-War scholars and historians, but also for anyone intrigued by the drama of the thirteen momentous days in October 1962.

Restricted Data
Restricted Data

Author: Alex Wellerstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-04-09

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 022602038X

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"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--