The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: Miscalculations, Escalation, and Near Nuclear Confrontation.

No single event during the Cold War era better exemplifies the volatility of superpower relations than does the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. New information, resulting from five recently held history conferences, has created a renewed interest in the Caribbean crisis. Also, Soviet Glasnost and Perestroika have disclosed revealing new facts that have aided in resolving questions that have perplexed scholars for over thirty years. Most notable of the newfound information was the discovery that the United States had not done a very good job in gathering and analyzing intelligence information. The U.S. also failed to recognize the purpose for the Soviet Unions involvement with the small, isolated island-nation of Cuba. These two miscalculations brought the world extremely close to nuclear war closer than ever before or ever since. The nature of the Cuban Missile Crisis was such that it was never a question of Kennedy against Khrushchev or even the United States against the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a much more complex situation that involved an enormous number of variables, many of which were not fully understood by either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R.