Article: Race to a standoff ; How an American officer pushed to build weapons of mass destruction to keep peace with the USSR

One by one, the hidden extremities of the Cold War are coming to light. We now know that the United States and the Soviet Union stumbled much closer to nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis than American leaders understood at the time, because the Soviets did in fact have operational land- and submarine-based nuclear weapons in and around Cuba, which a US attack would have triggered. In 1983 an annual NATO field exercise called Able Archer similarly almost frightened the Soviets into launching a preemptive first strike. A 1954 scheme to hit the USSR preventively with everything in the US nuclear arsenal, killing tens of millions of Soviet civilians, worked all the way up to ...

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