It is sixty years since the events of October 1962 brought the world close to nuclear catastrophe. The Cuban missile crisis has long been recognized as the moment of greatest danger in the life (and near death) of humanity. In those sixty years, our knowledge and understanding of events have undergone significant change. There are some reasons to be encouraged, inasmuch as we have learned how both President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev sought to avoid nuclear war. More omi...

Identifying “lessons learned” is not new—the military has been doing it for decades. However, members of the worldwide intelligence community have been slow to extract wider lessons gathered from the past and apply them to contemporary challenges. Learning from the Secret Past is a collection of ten carefully selected cases from post-World War II British intelligence history. Some of the cases include the Malayan Emergency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Northern Ireland, and the lead up to the...

Planning Armageddon provides the first detailed account of Britain's Command, Control, Intelligence and Communications infrastructure. A central theme of the book is the British-American atomic relationship and its implications for NATO strategy. Based on the recollections of officials and military officers in both Britain and the United States and

This volume brings together a collection of leading international experts to revisit and review our understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis, via a critical reappraisal of some of the key texts.In October 1962, humankind came close to the end of its history. The risk of catastrophe is now recognised by many to have been greater than realised by protagonists at the time or scholars subsequently. The Cuban missile crisis remains one of the mostly intensely studied moments of world h...

This collection of essays by leading experts seeks to explore what lessons for the exploitation and management of secret intelligence might be drawn from a variety of case studies ranging from the 1920s to the ‘War on Terror’.Long regarded as the ‘missing dimension’ of international history and politics, public and academic interest in the role of secret intelligence has continued to grow in recent years, not least as a result of controversy surrounding the terrorist attacks on the...

This edited volume addresses the main lessons and legacies of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from a global perspective.Despite the discoveries of recent research, there is still much more to be revealed about the handling of nuclear weapons before and during the Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC). Featuring contributions from a number of eminent international scholars of nuclear history, intelligence, espionage, political science and Cold War studies, An International History of the Cub...

The events of 9/11 and subsequent acts of jihadist terrorism, together with the failures of intelligence agencies over Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, have arguably heralded a new age of intelligence. For some this takes the form of a crisis of legitimacy. For others the threat of cataclysmic terrorism involving chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack gives added poignancy to the academic contention that intelligence failure is inevitable. Many of the challenges facing int...

This edited volume brings together many of the world’s leading scholars of intelligence with a number of former senior practitioners to facilitate a wide-ranging dialogue on the central challenges confronting students of intelligence.The book presents a series of documents, nearly all of which are published here for the first time, accompanied by both overview and commentary sections. The central objectives of this collection are twofold. First, it seeks to build on existing schola...

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"A minor classic in its laconic, spare, compelling evocation by a participant of the shifting moods and maneuvers of the most dangerous moment in human history."—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.In October 1962, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes the hour-by-hour negotiations, with particular...

In October, 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought human civilization to the brink of destruction. On the 50th anniversary of the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear era, two of the leading experts on the crisis recreate the drama of those tumultuous days as experienced by the leaders of the three countries directly involved: U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Cuban President Fidel Castro. Organized around the letters exchanged among the leaders a...

The groundbreaking and revelatory tale of the most dangerous years of the Cold War and the two leaders who held the fate of the world in their hands.This bestselling history takes us into the tumultuous period from 1960 through 1963 when the Berlin Wall was built and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the abyss. In this compelling narrative, author Michael Beschloss, praised by Newsweek as "th...