One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

As the years went by, it became clear that Kennedy’s missile crisis victory had produced many unintended consequences. One was an escalation in the Cold War arms race as Soviet leaders sought to erase the memory of the Cuban humiliation. “You got away with it this time, but you will never get away with it again,” the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, told a senior American official shortly after the removal of the Soviet missiles. The Soviet Union would never again allow itself to be in a position of strategic inferiority. In order to achieve military parity with the United States, Khrushchev’s successors embarked on a vast intercontinental ballistic missile program.