[mhh__]

LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba immediately...

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.

[arethuza]

President Johnson in '67:

"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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

[N1H1L]

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!

[mhh__]

I didn't realize he'd died. Good riddance, but still.