Documents pertaining to the Missile Crisis."To the Brink," an exhibit created by the National Archives and the John F.It was just the most devastating event in world history. It was neither Vietnam nor Watergate, nor was it Dallas on November 22, 1963. While participants and historians of the crisis never tire of recalling its details and its dangers, the majority of the generation that lived through it, and subsequent generations, never became emotionally engaged with its potential consequences. The Pentagon, opposed to any film that might undermine public enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, refused to cooperate.īut the Cuban Missile Crisis did not replicate On the Beach, and so thoughts about a Cuban Missile War passed unobtrusively into history. They were the last surviving humans, going quietly into the endless night. There were reports of viewers sobbing as Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins stoically prepared for the arrival over Australia of the deadly radioactive fallout from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Adapted for the screen by Stanley Kramer in 1959, On the Beach premiered simultaneously in major U.S. It was an unthinkable war, but not an unimagined one: In 1957 Australian writer Neville Shute described its denouement in his eerily tranquil apocalyptic novel, On the Beach. Double, perhaps even quadruple that number of Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese citizens perished, and no one had any reliable data on how many Western Europeans, Africans, Asians, Australians, and others were killed by the radioactive fallout as it enveloped the globe.Ĭuba instantly became a wasteland, and there were few structures left standing in Moscow and Washington, D.C. The estimated number of North American deaths was upwards of 200 million. The Cuban Missile War was the most devastating war in world history. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), meeting in the White House Cabinet Room, sorted through intelligence and advised the President during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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