Carl Robichaud

And we're fortunate that they also had the commodore of the fleet who outranked the captain.

And he basically said, let's wait, let's see what happens.

Arkhipov, exactly.

Yeah.

So there were three officers that would have needed to authorize the use of this weapon.

Two of them authorized it.

The third did not.

This story comes to us through the memoirs of these people and through some archival material.

And it's always hard to make sense of

these close call stories and how close we really came.

But I think this is just, you know, if you add up those three or four different things that were all happening on that day and any of them go wrong and you get nuclear war.

And as you said, Kennedy...

was the one person in that room who was willing to accept Khrushchev's offer.

I think Adlai Stevenson was also favorably inclined towards it, but all of the other advisors, both civilian and military, were basically saying, don't take this deal.

You don't want to betray Turkey and sell them out by trading off these missiles.

We're ready to go in on Monday with our invasion.

We have more nuclear forces.

We're in a better position.

And so they were ready to go.

And the story that for many years people took from the Cuban Missile Crisis is that you need to demonstrate resolve.