Thirty-six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, these declassified documents stand as testament to just how dangerously close the world came to nuclear destruction in 1962, and challenge the official history of the event as a model of crisis management. This collection of formerly secret records includes: correspondence between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Kruschev, and Fidel Castro; intelligence reports; minutes; cables; and documents released since the publication of the hardback edition. The editors have provided a document-by-document account of the most important superpower confrontation of the 20th century.