It was fifty years ago this week that the world was on the brink in a way it had never been before – a superpower confrontation that threatened global annihilation – all over a nuclear missile site in Cuba. John F. Kennedy wouldn’t call it a blockade or even sanctions against the island nation; he preferred the term “quarantine.”
Those who were alive will never forget the tension of a time deemed in a new special “Cuban Missile Crisis – Three Men Go to War” (PBS, 8 p.m., check local listings) subtitled “The Most Dangerous Days in the History of Mankind.” Perhaps it’s that kind of excess that got the world into that mess to begin with.
The three men in question, of course, are Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The film, from John Murray, includes interviews with Khrushchev’s son, U.S. national Security Council executive committee member Ted Sorensen before his death in 2010. Some of the soldiers involved in the standoff are also still alive to talk about it – from Russia as well as the U.S.
And as is the case when enough time has passed, and much more is known about those days because of declassified recordings and the ability to interview those considered the enemy. Certainly, the incident has resonance a half century later, when another blockade over nuclear viability dominates foreign policy talks during a presidential campaign.
An even more unsung aspect of the conflict comes on “Secrets of the Dead” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings) in which nuclear submarines in the waters off of Florida were given permission to fire a nuclear weapon, but three men had to be in agreement to do so – Soviet naval officer vasili Arkhipov stood alone in refusing to do so. Which of course is pretty much the plot of the ABC series “Last Resort.”
A longer version of this story is online at Salon.com.