As many of you know, this October marked the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After half a century it’s still hard to forget John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev’s battle of power that nearly detonated a nuclear war. Suspicions began to arise of the Soviets secretly putting nuclear weapons in Cuba aimed at United States soil. Yet it wasn’t until Kennedy and the United States Ambassador to the UN had visual proof of these weapons that they were able to give the Soviet Union an ultimatum that saved the world from Armageddon.
To thank for those important images we have Captain Gerald Coffee and his teammates. As part of a reconnaissance mission they risked their lives to fly over communist land and take pictures of America’s pending doom. Listen to Captain Coffee’s personal account during this enlightening interviews on national television.
CBS Sunday Morning “When the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war”