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Episode details

Radio 4,23 Oct 2002,45 mins

The Cuban Missile Crisis: As Seen From Moscow and Havana

Available for over a year

On the evening of 22 October 1962 President John F Kennedy announced to a shocked American nation that Soviet missile sites had been discovered in Cuba. While much of the western world held its breath, terrified by the prospect of imminent nuclear war, what was happening in the USSR and Cuba? Until now little has been known about what was happening inside Khrushchev's Kremlin and Castro's Havana headquarters. Using documents from the KGB archive and interviews with key Soviet and Cuban insiders who were present as the crisis unfolded, the BBC's former Moscow correspondent Allan Little pieces together the "untold" side of the story.

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