For decades, the incident was taught in war colleges and graduate schools as a case study in the art of “crisis management.” A young American president went “eyeball to eyeball” with a Russian chairman and forced him to back down through a skillful blend of diplomacy and force. called the Cuban Missile Crisis “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Scholars and politicians agree that for several days the world was the closest it has ever come to nuclear Armageddon.īut the nature of the risks confronting Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev have been widely misunderstood.
Evidence soon emerged it had been shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile near the town of Banes. came news that another U-2, piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., was missing while on an intelligence-gathering mission over eastern Cuba. “There’s always some sonofabitch who doesn’t get the word,” was Kennedy’s frustrated response.įacebook | Twitter 2:03 p.m. Pentagon records show that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was not informed about the missing U-2 until 1:41 p.m., 101 minutes after Maultsby first penetrated Soviet airspace. But there was little they could do with this information: The ability to “read the mail” of Russian air defenses was a closely guarded Cold War secret. They knew Maultsby’s location, as they had tapped into the Soviet air-defense tracking network. On the ground, SAC commanders were frantically trying to retrieve their wayward reconnaissance plane.
Because of the heightened alert, the F-102s were armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles, sufficient firepower to destroy an entire fleet of incoming Soviet bombers. The Air Force’s Alaskan Air Command sent up two F-102 fighters to guide him back across the Bering Strait and prevent any penetration of American airspace by the Russian MiGs. Washington time, Maultsby shut down his single Pratt & Whitney J57 engine and entrusted his fate to his U-2’s extraordinary gliding capabilities. That was sufficient for a 4,000-mile round trip between Fairbanks’ Eielson Air Force Base and the North Pole, but not enough for a 1,000-mile detour over Siberia. Flying at an altitude of 70,000 feet, the 11-year Air Force veteran was oblivious to the drama below.Ī former member of the Air Force’s Thunderbirds flight-demonstration team, Maultsby had enough fuel in his tank for nine hours and 40 minutes of flight. Maultsby unwittingly penetrated Soviet airspace in a desolate region of the Chukot Peninsula opposite Alaska. Navy destroyers were playing a cat-and-mouse game with Russian submarines armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes.Īnd then, at 11:59 a.m., a U-2 spy plane piloted by Captain Charles W. Strategic Air Command’s missiles and manned bombers had been ordered to DEFCON-2, one step short of nuclear war.
American reconnaissance aircraft were drawing enemy fire. 27, 1962, the day that later became known as “Black Saturday.” More than 100,000 American troops were preparing to invade Cuba to topple Fidel Castro’s communist regime and destroy dozens of Soviet intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missiles thought to be aimed at targets in the United States. It was one minute before high noon on Oct. Cuban Missile Crisis: How Close America Came to Nuclear War With Russia Close
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