The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2005

E841

2004-020532

0-8047-5077-7

The week the world stood still; inside the secret Cuban Missile Crisis.

Stern, Sheldon M. (Stanford nuclear age series)

Stanford U. Press, [c]2005

238 p.

$14.95 (pa)

In this revised and condensed version of Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings, Stern (former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library from 1977 to 1999) uses his own transcriptions of the now declassified tapes of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council in order to construct a narrative of the body's deliberations after the discovery of Soviet ballistic missiles and consequent eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in which the world arguably came its closest it ever has to the outbreak of nuclear war.