The Cuban Missile Crisis is another example where if things had been left purely to the militaries of both sides things would probably have escalated very badly.
One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.
Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."
Thanks for that name. I went down a rabbit hole, and found out that the double agent who blew his handler's cover - George Blake died less than a month back!
The story of the CMC is absolutely bonkers. There were so many close calls and possible disasters that I am surprised we even ended up in this non-nuked timeline, even with the anthropic principle!
I don't think that's true, but I'll also admit that the history of the cold war is very muddled and I am no historian.
The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.
TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).
Some facts we do know though:
1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office
Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.
I need to watch that again - saw it years ago when it first came out. I'm currently reading Ellsberg's Secrets
A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - which is pretty shocking - they knew all along they could never win in Vietnam but continued for "reasons".
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
Any similar books that are not written by either born US persons or people heavily influenced by US either via politics or education? Not saying the information in the books are not true, but would love an opinion and summation on the matter from someone not so deep into US politics.
One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.
Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.