Won't admit to "being there" as I was six years old at the time.

I remember that in that timeframe, all of the children in our community were issued dogtags. We lived in Pittsburgh, which was a first-strike target for its steel production. I can remember riding on a local road, going past a line of blast furnaces.

To this day, when our county runs its weekly test of the severe weather alert sirens, I get a shot of adrenaline.

Defense secretary Robert McNamara told JFK on 20 October that there were 6,000 to 8,000 Soviet "technicians" on Cuba. In fact, there were 43,000 heavily armed Soviet troops on the island at this point.

Maybe it was a good thing Kennedy didn't know that.

I was 1 at the time, so I don't remember anything. Interesting article, worth the read. Thanks.

It occurs to me now that I lived through one event that was probably in some aspects similar to the CMC. When I was about 10, the Chernobyl NPP exploded and I lived some 800 miles downwind.

It took a few days for the commie state media to admit what happened. We knew what was going on right away because a number of people (including my dad) watched Austrian TV news. Official information was scarce, no one trusted the lying liars in the state media anyway, so people tended to assume the worst.

I remember that we kids tried to stay out of the rain and not spend more time outside than necessary. In fifth grade or so, we'd had enough drills under our belt (preparing for the day the dreaded imperialists drop the bomb on us) to know that radioactivity kills you even if you don't see it or smell it or feel it.

Everyone was afraid or at least very uneasy, in large part because we didn't know much, and we knew that those who did know wouldn't tell us anyway. In the end it turned out to be a lot less bad than people feared (where I lived, anyway), but it was not a good time.

I was six at the time and I remember it. We practiced "tornado" drills in grade school for years, filing out into the hall and sitting bent over with our hands on our heads against the wall. We do have occasional tornadoes in Northern Illinois but I suspect the name had been changed since the duck and cover days so as not to give everybody nightmares.

One of my customers, a man twenty years older than me once told me he was in a hospital in SF with a severely broken leg in October 1962. With a full leg cast and 10 stories up he was very concerned. He thought there'd be no way for him to evacuate the building let alone the city.

What's been known for a few years now is Soviet missile commanders on the ground in Cuba had operational control and orders to use the nukes instead of lose them in case of attack. Robert McNamara's freaked out response when he learned that in the documentary made about him a few years ago shows you all you need to know about how close we came to all out nuclear war. The Joint Chiefs and the CIA were all for bombing and/or invasion of Cuba to take out those missiles and the Castro regime. That was the exact response that the missiles were meant to deter and would have triggered nuclear war.

If you want a Hollywood version of those tense days in the WH check out the movie "Thirteen Days in October".

I was 3 years old, so no first-hand memory of the missile crisis.

For me, the question raised by this discussion is: If a similar situation arose in our time, who would you want in the White House? Obama, who seems to be a methodical and deliberative decision maker, or McCain, who can't seem to keep his facts straight and by all accounts blows his top at the slightest provocation?

I don't want Gramps McHothead anywhere near that button!

It happened long before I was born. When I first read about this in more detail, I was in a college history course. I liked Kennedy a little better because to me it felt like he had an understanding or perhaps a deeper horror of the nuclear option. I don't think he was the kind of guy who could or would sleep like a baby once he'd used that last of all options.

I liked this story and liked the header too. Made me laugh at the end. Hey, the interviews and competing archives overturn the established authority. LOL! Thanks, codegen86.

It doesn't matter whether you were alive at the time or not since those living through it (I wasn't one of them) had no real knowledge of the facts via the news media anyway.

jsfox has a nice list above -- and makes many of the points I was going to make (particularly the Soviet-Sino split). I would quibble that the US was "encouraged" by the crisis of going after regime changes since we had no issues doing that in the 50's. The nuclear test-ban treaty wasn't a result of this crisis either -- it was a result of the accidents with radioactive fall-out from larger and larger nuclear tests starting in the 50's.

The hot line link was critical, of course.

Other, less well discussed points include:

a) Stevenson's performance in the UN. It showed patience to get a world consensus. Nixon and GHWB both demonstrated this type of facile geo-political manipulation. Powell's performance in front of the UN is still a mystery: did he really believe all what he was saying? This is the problem with lack of credibility in the White House. The "go it alone" attitude has cost us today -- especially since it is possible (as we saw in Cuba) to have bad intelligence without any specific manipulation.

b) Informal channels being as much of a key as the formal channels. Particularly RFK's backdoor channel to a Soviet diplomat to better understand the two cables from Khrushchev received.

c) JFK removing the outdated Jupiter missiles in Turkey is a great example of why uniform disarming is not always a good thing. JFK had a chip that cost nothing to give away and let Khruschchev go to the Politburo with something in hand. I am not familiar with missile withdrawals in Italy as being part of the deal. Can you cite a source on this, jsfox?

d) Luck played a tremendous role. The fact is that the crisis was not entirely in the hands of the leaders. This is why patience is so important -- it allows time for things to develop and settle out. There is some interesting discussion of this by McNamara (as pointed out by markg8 above) in the documentary: The Fog of War.

Ironically, JFK ran on a "missle gap" platform in 1960 which Nixon knew did not exist. The irony is that Nixon put the country ahead of his own interests on this issue, by suffering the outrageous claims of JFK on this topic during the campaign.

The real lesson of the crisis: in an age of rapid response, you have to wait as long as possible before you think about using it.

In October 1962 I had just turned 13. It was a very scary time. The news seemed to focus on what the possible targets were that these nukes could reach; our local news made a big deal of our local coal resources considered a good energy source at the time (not so much now, of course). I remember asking my dad if we were all going to die. My dad kept reassuring me and my siblings that all would be well.

It wasn't such a quick thing, either. The blockade went up and we all collectively held our breaths since we realized it was not just an answer to the missiles but perhaps would be viewed as a provocation--Krushev was viewed as an out-of-control nut. Of course we didn't know the back story of the military wanting to go nuts and JFK and RFK keeping a patient hand. But we did know about the blockade and the risks; JFK was extremely reassuring. It was widely viewed as extremely courageous and reassuring that Jackie and the two children remained at the White House since the White House was seen as probably the first target.

It was the WW II folks who were in charge; and they faced the whole thing with courage. It certainly kept most folks calmed down at the time. I've often thought that this incident was the reason for my fascination with "end of time" science fiction. :)

I was 14 years old at the time and remember the feeling of anxiety that our city might draw a missile or two or three. Nuclear war was an active possibility in people's heads back then.

I wasn't politically savvy on international relations at that time (and still am not), and couldn't really form my own threat assessment(like "maybe there's a 50% chance that its all coming to an end") so just trusted that the grownups would work things out sub-nuclearly!

And thats the way it all worked out. WWII was still in the recent past and the Soviets had been bled white by the Great Patriotic War and most of their west of the Urals country trashed; they really didn't want to start another one I don't think, no matter what historians say.

Now those living memories are gone over there and the younger generations coming up don't remember what a god-awful hell that war on one's own soil is. Makes WWIII a lot more likely now than it was in 1962.