Abstract
On Sunday 28 October 1962 the British Defence Secretary, Peter Thorneycroft, arrived in Whitehall. ‘It was very quiet, rather a lovely morning’, he recalled, and as he walked into the Ministry of Defence, he thought: ‘My God I wonder whether this really is it.’1 The previous evening, his American counterpart, Robert McNamara, recounts that, ‘as I left the White House and walked through the garden to my car to return to the Pentagon on that beautiful fall evening, I feared I might never live to see another Saturday night.’2 Other British Cabinet ministers worried that war was imminent. Lord Hailsham, whose wife had just given birth, considered whether to baptise the child himself. In Washington, on the morning of Sunday 28 October, the KGB reported to Moscow that the President of the United States had gone to church.4 With the world on the brink of nuclear war, Khrushchev and his Presidium colleagues debated whether Kennedy was making peace with his creator before making war with the Soviet Union.
Keywords
Foreign Policy Nuclear Weapon European Economic Community British Government American ActionPreview
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Notes
- 4.R.N. Lebow and J.G. Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 142.Google Scholar
- 27.Since the twenty-fifth anniversary, various important studies have appeared, including: B.J. Allyn, J.G. Blight, and D.A. Welch, Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Conference, January 27–28, 1989, CSIA Occasional Paper No. 9 (Lanham, Maryland: University of America Press, 1992)Google Scholar
- J.G. Blight and D.A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis, (New York: Noonday Press, 1990)Google Scholar
- J.G. Blight, B.J. Allyn, and D.A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)Google Scholar
- D.A. Brugioni (Ed. R.F. McCort), EyeBall to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1991)Google Scholar
- M. Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988)Google Scholar
- R.L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1989)Google Scholar
- P. Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters 1957–1963 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar
- J.A. Nathan (Ed.), The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992)Google Scholar
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- T. Risse-Kappen, Cooperation Among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 146–82Google Scholar
- 31.British nuclear activities are entirely neglected in key studies, for example, M. Trachtenberg, ‘The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis’, International Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985) and History and Strategy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 235–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 43.See in particular, J. Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy 1945–1964 (OUP, 1995); I. Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (OUP, 1994); J. Melissen, The Struggle for Nuclear Partnership: Britain, the United States and the Making of an Ambiguous Alliance 1952–1959 (Groningen: Styx, 1993)Google Scholar
- S. Twigge and L. Scott, Fail Deadly? Britain and the Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, 1945–1964 (Aberystwyth: Nuclear History Program Report, 1997).Google Scholar