Recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust — the blackest day of a horrendous week.

It was an incredibly beautiful autumn day. There was an almost sinister tranquillity in London. I recall walking across Hyde Park, almost deserted, and thinking ‘this is my last walk, the last day I shall spend with my tiny children, the end of all hopes for their future …it’s the end’. And yet a still small voice within me, of belief in the fundamental humanistic values of Americans, and their good sense, told me that it wasn’t going to be the end. JFK would not allow it….

The following day, Sunday, it was all over — suddenly, as abruptly as it had begun, the week-long crisis was over.