Anyone who lived through it remembers the terror, the uncertainty, and the dread that in an instant the world as we knew it might cease to exist. For the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the future seemed to hang by a thread; nuclear holocaust not only seemed possible, but likely. U.S. military forces around the world were placed on high alert, and American nuclear bombers and land-based missiles were moved to DEFCON-2: the highest state of readiness short of war. The military forces of the Soviet Union were moved to a similar level of readiness, and both sides were ready for World War III.

DEFCON-2 presents the most complete, lively, and shocking account of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the events leading up to it that has ever been published. Drawing from hundreds of newly declassified American and Soviet documents, as well as interviews with numerous individuals who were directly involved in the political, military, and diplomatic aspects of the crisis, this chilling narrative is the first to fully reveal how close the world came to Armageddon in 1962.

Authors Norman Polmar and John Gresham provide a detailed description of the run-up to the crisis in the summer of 1962. They demonstrate how the Kennedy administration's virulent antipathy to Fidel Castro and tendency toward Cold War gamesmanship fueled Nikita Khrushchev's desire to shield the Castro regime, even as he tried to redress the Soviet inferiority in strategic missiles that could strike the American homeland.

Even more unsettling than this face-off between strong and determined world leaders are the startling number of "small" events and details, any one of which might have triggered a worldwide conflagration. As the crisis progressed, a U2 spyplane was lost over the North Pole and eastern Siberia; an exhausted Soviet submarine commander in the Caribbean considered using a torpedo armed with a nuclear warhead if necessary; and urgent communications between the two superpowers depended, in large part, on the reliability of Western Union messenger boys on bicycles!

As Tom Clancy remarks in his memorable foreword to this unforgettable tale: "The reality of the confrontation in October 1962 was more bizarre and more frightening than anything I have written." Just how strange things became is revealed in interviews with the U.S. Air Force photo interpreter who first sighted the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, a KGB agent stationed in Washington in 1962, a U.S. Navy officer stationed on the quarantine line during the crisis, and yes, that Soviet submarine commander who, for a few crucial minutes, held the fate of the world in his hands.

Tom Clancy said it: truth is stranger and scarier than fiction. And DEFCON-2 is more gripping, more thrilling, and more terrifying than any novel you will ever read.
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