Search

Over the past 50 years, dozens of articles have appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And with each passing year, new and relevant information has been reported -- which, for better or worse, has taught readers that the world was closer to full-scale nuclear war than was originally thought.

On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy shocked the world by announcing the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba and by imposing a blockade on missile-carrying ships moving toward the island. With the superpower navies about to collide, many experts feared an escalation to nuclear war. Though historians have credited American resolve for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's decision to stop his ships and withdraw his missiles, resolution of the crisis was actually far more complex.

At the Seventh Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Review Conference in Geneva last December, the treaty's 165 member states agreed to a new intersessional process of work to be done in preparation for the next such conference, in 2016. This new process retained the limited aim ("to discuss, and promote common understanding and effective action") of the previous two intersessional processes, but it did restructure the convention's annual meeting of experts and state parties within the process.