The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis, was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 political satire black comedy film co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers in three roles, including the title character.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
Nuclear strategy involves the development of doctrines and strategies for the production and use of nuclear weapons.
Curtis Emerson LeMay was an American Air Force general who implemented an effective but controversial strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. He later served as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, from 1961 to 1965.
Herman Kahn was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War. Kahn posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr. Strangelove. In his commentary for Fail Safe, director Sidney Lumet remarked that the Professor Groeteschele character is also based on Herman Kahn. Kahn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.
Red Alert is a 1958 novel by Peter George about nuclear war. The book provided the underlying narrative structure for Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick's film differs significantly from the novel in that the film is a black comedy.
"A Little Peace and Quiet" is the second segment of the first episode of the first season of the television series The Twilight Zone. In this segment, a woman discovers a pendant which allows her to freeze time.
The Bedford Incident is a 1965 British-American Cold War film directed by James B. Harris, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, and produced by Harris and Widmark. The cast also features Eric Portman, James MacArthur, Martin Balsam, and Wally Cox, as well as early appearances by Donald Sutherland and Ed Bishop. James Poe adapted Mark Rascovich's 1963 novel of the same name, which borrowed from the plot of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; at one point in the film, the captain is advised he is "not chasing whales now".
Peter Bryan George was a Welsh author, most famous for the 1958 Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, published initially with the title Two Hours to Doom and written using the pseudonym Peter Bryant. The book was the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
By Dawn's Early Light is an HBO original movie, first aired in 1990. It is based on the 1983 novel Trinity's Child, written by William Prochnau.
The Martin MGM-1 Matador was the first operational surface-to-surface cruise missile designed and built by the United States. It was developed after World War II, drawing upon their wartime experience with creating the Republic-Ford JB-2, a copy of the German V-1. The Matador was similar in concept to the V-1, but it included a radio command that allowed in-flight course corrections. This allowed accuracy to be maintained over greatly extended ranges of just under 1000 km. To allow these ranges, the Matador was powered by a small turbojet engine in place of the V-1's much less efficient pulsejet.
The Moscow–Washington hotline is a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and the Russian Federation. This hotline was established in 1963 and links the Pentagon with the Kremlin. Although in popular culture it is known as the "red telephone", the hotline was never a telephone line, and no red phones were used. The first implementation used Teletype equipment, and shifted to fax machines in 1986. Since 2008, the Moscow–Washington hotline has been a secure computer link over which messages are exchanged by a secure form of email.
Fail-Safe is a bestselling American novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The story was initially serialized in three installments in the Saturday Evening Post, on October 13, 20, and 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fail Safe is a 2000 televised broadcast play, based on Fail-Safe, the Cold War novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The play, broadcast live in black and white on CBS, starred George Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss, Harvey Keitel, and Noah Wyle, and was one of the few live dramas on American television since its Golden Age in the 1950s and 1960s. The broadcast was introduced by Walter Cronkite : it was directed by veteran British filmmaker Stephen Frears.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
Jet Pilot is a 1957 American Cold War romance film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring John Wayne and Janet Leigh. It was written and produced by Jules Furthman, and presented by Howard Hughes. Filming lasted more than eighteen months, beginning in 1949. The last day of shooting was in May 1953, but the Technicolor film was kept out of release by Hughes due to his tinkering until October 1957, by which time Hughes had sold RKO. Universal-International ended up distributing Jet Pilot.
The bomber gap was the Cold War belief that the Soviet Union's Long Range Aviation department had gained an advantage in deploying jet-powered strategic bombers. Widely accepted for several years by US officials, the gap was used as a political talking point in the United States to justify a great increase in defense spending.
Operation Chrome Dome was a United States Air Force Cold War-era mission from 1961 to 1968 in which B-52 strategic bomber aircraft armed with thermonuclear weapons remained on continuous airborne alert, flying routes that put them in positions to attack targets in the Soviet Union if they were ordered to do so. The exact routes varied by year, but in general there were routes that went to positions over the Canadian arctic, Alaska, Greenland, and the Mediterranean Sea. Many American Air Force Bases in the 1960s allocated at least one bomber crew to "Chrome Dome" duty on a regular basis, and many other bases, including foreign bases, were involved in the refueling operations. Over the years the mission involved overflights of American, Canadian, Danish (Greenland), and Spanish territory, among others. The goal of "Chrome Dome" was to keep a number of nuclear-armed aircraft in a position to help guaranteed nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union in the event that the latter was somehow able to destroy the majority of US nuclear weapons still on the ground, while also ensuring that Strategic Air Command bomber crews had experience with airborne alert procedures so that, in the event of heightened concern, the number of patrolling bombers could be increased dramatically. Several high-profile nuclear accidents were associated with the "Chrome Dome" program, including the accidental release of nuclear weapons on foreign territory, and it was shut down in the wake of one such accident in 1968.
