Thirty-six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, these declassified documents stand as testament to just how dangerously close the world came to nuclear destruction in 1962, and challenge the official history of the event as a model of crisis management.

This collection of formerly secret records - including correspondence between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Krushchev, and Fidel Castro, as well as intelligence reports, minutes, and cables - provides a unique fly-on-the-wall view of the policy decisions and operations that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The editors have provided a document-by-document account of the most important superpower confrontation of the twentieth century.